Amira Pharmaceuticals, Inc. announced that it has successfully identified a novel pre-clinical candidate for its newest lysophosphatidic acid (LPA)-related programme, autotaxin. Autotaxin is an enzyme upstream from LPA receptors and has been implicated in a number of diseases including rheumatoid arthritis, glioblastoma, lung, breast, ovarian and thyroid cancers.

“We are pleased to announce that we have identified an orally bio-available and highly selective autotaxin inhibitor,” said Peppi Prasit, PhD, chief scientific officer. “Previous published data implicates autotaxin as a potent stimulator of tumour cell motility. Cells over expressing autotaxin result in amplified tumourigenesis and metastatic potential. These observations when combined with our recent pre-clinical experiments, which demonstrated that an autotaxin-specific inhibitor can successfully inhibit tumour metastases, are quite exciting.”

Bob Baltera, chief executive officer added “As we have stated before, we are committed to exploring the science and medicine related to the LPA pathway. We believe there are numerous potential drug targets in this pathway, and our autotaxin inhibitor is the latest in our portfolio of LPA-related drug targets, which also includes our LPA1 receptor antagonist AM152 which is currently in phase 1 clinical trials. While a great deal of work remains in advancing the autotaxin programme to the clinic, we look forward to communicating our progress in 2011.”

Founded in 2005 and headquartered in San Diego, Amira Pharmaceuticals is a small molecule pharmaceutical company focused on the discovery and early development of compounds to treat inflammatory disease linked to the phospholipid pathways. Amira has a strategic partnership with GlaxoSmithKline for the development of FLAP (5-lipoxygenase activating protein) inhibitors in respiratory and cardiovascular disease.