Skip to main content

New Drug Approvals 2012 - Pt. XXIII - Omacetaxine mepesuccinate (SYNRIBOTM)



ATC code: L01XX40
Wikipedia: Omacetaxine_mepesuccinate

On October 22nd 2012 the FDA approved omacetaxine mepesuccinate (research code: CGX-635, trivial name: Homoharringtonine, trademark: SynriboTM) for the treatment of chronic or accelerated phase chronic myeloid leukaemia (CML) in adults with resistance to two or more tyrosine kinase inhibitors. Omacetaxine is an old drug identified 35 years ago and known to have activity in CML, but its clinical development was previously halted due to the discovery of BCL-ABL and other targeted kinase inhibitors Pubmed: 21294709. The rapid development of tyrosine kinase inhibitor resistant tumors has led to the need for agents that can act in these treatment-derived drug-resistant patients. Omacetaxine mepesuccinate has been approved based on observed major cytogenetic response rather than on improvement in disease-related symptoms or increased survival.



Omacetaxine mepesuccinate/homoharringtonine is a cephalotaxine ester of prepared by a semi-synthetic process from cephalotaxine, an extract from the leaves of Cephalotaxus sp found in Southern China. Its molecular formula is C29H39NO9, with an IUPAC name of 4-methyl (2R)-hydroxyl-2-(4-hydroxyl-4-methylpentyl) butanedioate, its molecular weight is 545.6 Da. It is absorbed following subcutaneous administration, and maximum plasma (Tmax) concentrations are achieved after ~30 minutes. The volume of distribution (Vd) is variable at 141 +/- 93.4 L following subcutaneous administration of 1.25 mg/m2 twice daily for 11 days.

The mechanistic target of omacetaxine mepesuccinate is not fully known, however its action includes inhibition of protein synthesis. It was found to bind to the A-site cleft in the peptidyl-transferase center of the large ribosomal subunit in archaeabacteria and is understood to prevent the correct positioning of amino acid side chains of incoming aminoacyl-tRNAs, thus inhibiting the elongation step of peptide synthesis. 

It was shown in vitro to reduce the protein levels of a number of oncogenic proteins including BCR-ABL and MCL1. Because it does not bind BRC-ABL directly, it is active both in wild-type and resistant tumours harbouring the ABL drug resistance mutant: T351I as seen in mouse models.

Prescribing information is here

SynriboTM is marketed by IVAX pharmaceuticals

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

Here's a nice Christmas gift - ChEMBL 35 is out!

Use your well-deserved Christmas holidays to spend time with your loved ones and explore the new release of ChEMBL 35!            This fresh release comes with a wealth of new data sets and some new data sources as well. Examples include a total of 14 datasets deposited by by the ASAP ( AI-driven Structure-enabled Antiviral Platform) project, a new NTD data se t by Aberystwyth University on anti-schistosome activity, nine new chemical probe data sets, and seven new data sets for the Chemogenomic library of the EUbOPEN project. We also inlcuded a few new fields that do impr ove the provenance and FAIRness of the data we host in ChEMBL:  1) A CONTACT field has been added to the DOCs table which should contain a contact profile of someone willing to be contacted about details of the dataset (ideally an ORCID ID; up to 3 contacts can be provided). 2) In an effort to provide more detailed information about the source of a deposited dat...

Improvements in SureChEMBL's chemistry search and adoption of RDKit

    Dear SureChEMBL users, If you frequently rely on our "chemistry search" feature, today brings great news! We’ve recently implemented a major update that makes your search experience faster than ever. What's New? Last week, we upgraded our structure search engine by aligning it with the core code base used in ChEMBL . This update allows SureChEMBL to leverage our FPSim2 Python package , returning results in approximately one second. The similarity search relies on 256-bit RDKit -calculated ECFP4 fingerprints, and a single instance requires approximately 1 GB of RAM to run. SureChEMBL’s FPSim2 file is not currently available for download, but we are considering generating it periodicaly and have created it once for you to try in Google Colab ! For substructure searches, we now also use an RDKit -based solution via SubstructLibrary , which returns results several times faster than our previous implementation. Additionally, structure search results are now sorted by...

ChEMBL 34 is out!

We are delighted to announce the release of ChEMBL 34, which includes a full update to drug and clinical candidate drug data. This version of the database, prepared on 28/03/2024 contains:         2,431,025 compounds (of which 2,409,270 have mol files)         3,106,257 compound records (non-unique compounds)         20,772,701 activities         1,644,390 assays         15,598 targets         89,892 documents Data can be downloaded from the ChEMBL FTP site:  https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/ Please see ChEMBL_34 release notes for full details of all changes in this release:  https://ftp.ebi.ac.uk/pub/databases/chembl/ChEMBLdb/releases/chembl_34/chembl_34_release_notes.txt New Data Sources European Medicines Agency (src_id = 66): European Medicines Agency's data correspond to EMA drugs prior to 20 January 2023 (excluding ...

Improved querying for SureChEMBL

    Dear SureChEMBL users, Earlier this year we ran a survey to identify what you, the users, would like to see next in SureChEMBL. Thank you for offering your feedback! This gave us the opportunity to have some interesting discussions both internally and externally. While we can't publicly reveal precisely our plans for the coming months (everything will be delivered at the right time), we can at least say that improving the compound structure extraction quality is a priority. Unfortunately, the change won't happen overnight as reprocessing 167 millions patents takes a while. However, the good news is that the new generation of optical chemical structure recognition shows good performance, even for patent images! We hope we can share our results with you soon. So in the meantime, what are we doing? You may have noticed a few changes on the SureChEMBL main page. No more "Beta" flag since we consider the system to be stable enough (it does not mean that you will never ...

ChEMBL brings drug bioactivity data to the Protein Data Bank in Europe

In the quest to develop new drugs, understanding the 3D structure of molecules is crucial. Resources like the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe) and the Cambridge Structural Database (CSD) provide these 3D blueprints for many biological molecules. However, researchers also need to know how these molecules interact with their biological target – their bioactivity. ChEMBL is a treasure trove of bioactivity data for countless drug-like molecules. It tells us how strongly a molecule binds to a target, how it affects a biological process, and even how it might be metabolized. But here's the catch: while ChEMBL provides extensive information on a molecule's activity and cross references to other data sources, it doesn't always tell us if a 3D structure is available for a specific drug-target complex. This can be a roadblock for researchers who need that structural information to design effective drugs. Therefore, connecting ChEMBL data with resources like PDBe and CSD is essen...