PHusis is designing precision medicines using its proprietary computational modeling platform, PHuDock to rapidly identify inhibitors of proteins with regulatory PH-domains that drive cancer growth. The approach provides PHusis with the means of identifying drug leads more rapidly and in a cost effective manner. The result is, PHusis has built a pipeline of drug leads against some novel and critical cancer targets including PDK1, mutant KRAS and NRAS. Patients can be selected for treatment based on their mutational profile, eliminating unnecessary treatment of patients without the targets. PHusis Therapeutics is focused on targeting the PH Domain (pleckstrin homology domain) of proteins that are critical in many therapeutic applications including cancer, inflammation, cardiovascular and neurological diseases and diabetes. The PH domain is known to regulate protein signaling and its inhibition with small molecules that bind specifically to this portion of the protein, provides a novel approach to disease modulation.Using both experimental and in silico library screening techniques, PHusis has identified a novel class of nonâlipid-based compounds that bind selectively to the PH domain of AKT. Calculated binding affinities compared favorably with those measured using Surface Plasmon Resonance spectroscopy. Some of the compounds exhibited high selectivity towards the AKT PH domain compared with IRS1 and PDK1. The compounds inhibited AKT regulated cell proliferation and induced apoptosis. The firm is closely tied to JLab system
