Completed Cancer Digestion, Kidneys & Other Organs

Phase 1 Randomised Clinical Trial of the First-in-Class KMO inhibitor KNS366

Funder InnovateUK (part of UKRI)
Recipient organisation Kynos Therapeutics LTD
Funding £2.5M
Period Mar 2022 — Mar 2024

In plain English

AI plain-English summary

A new drug that alters how immune cells process energy is entering its first human safety tests, with the goal of preventing kidney damage after major open heart surgery. This matters because inflammation-driven kidney injury is a serious complication of cardiac surgery, and no existing medicine directly targets the metabolic pathways that drive it. The drug, developed by Kynos Therapeutics, works by changing the metabolism of immune cells, aiming to dial down damaging inflammation while leaving other defences intact. If the current trial in healthy volunteers shows the drug is safe and alters metabolism as expected, it would open the door to patient trials—initially testing whether it can prevent kidney damage after open heart surgery. The same approach might also have applications in cancer treatment. Success would mean a fundamentally new class of anti-inflammatory medicine, one that works at the cellular fuel level rather than broadly suppressing the immune system. This could reduce the need for dialysis after surgery and shorten hospital stays, quietly improving outcomes for thousands of patients each year.

View original technical description
Our company, Kynos Therapeutics Ltd., is developing a new kind of medicine to treat diseases caused by inflammation, especially kidney damage after major open heart surgery, and that may also have a use against cancer. This new medicine affects the metabolism of cells and tissues, and especially how cells of the immune system function. Our new medicine has all the characteristics required to be developed into a successful drug for patients, and has been extensively safety-tested in experimental models.\r\n\r\nIn order to continue the new medicines development process, we need to now make sure that this new medicine is safe for human use. In this project, which is a clinical trial recruiting healthy volunteers, we will carefully measure the safety of the new medicine by giving a very low dose of the new medicine and gradually increasing the dose across different groups of volunteers, ultimately reaching a dose level that we expect will be the dose used in patients. Throughout all of this process, the safety of the volunteers will be our foremost priority.\r\n\r\nIf our project is successful and the medicine is safe in humans, and blood tests show that the medicine changes metabolism in the way we expect it to, we will have made a game-changing leap forward and opened the door to follow-on clinical trials involving patients, initially to trial whether the medicine can prevent kidney damage after major open heart surgery.

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Original classification

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