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SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY
Incyte: Exploring Multiple Applications for Existing Treatments
immune systems to fight cancer
can be applied to dermatological conditions, which often have to do with inflammation and autoimmune issues. Incyte isn’t just doing this
as something of a coincidental pursuit. It believes the future of medicine will deal heavily with the autoimmune system.
One example of this is the dual usage of ruxolitinib, an oral therapy developed by Incyte that
has been proven successful in treating adults with intermediate or high-risk myelofibrosis and polycythemia vera, rare blood cancers, and for those suffering from Graft-Versus-Host Disease, which occurs when the body refuses to accept a bone marrow treatment. Its cream form can help people with vitiligo, a skin condition in which cells lose their pigmentation.
“We don’t start with the disease,” Hoppenot says. “We start with the biology and see where it’s going to lead us.”
Because immune system issues can cause so many problems throughout the body, it is possible Incyte scientists will find that their research in cancer treatments can impact people in other ways. Like much of the research undertaken in laboratories, this will take some time, but the results being seen now have led to significant optimism about the future.
“It’s a very long cycle,” Hoppenot says. “We have hundreds of people working in Wilmington on projects that might not be valuable until 2030 or ’31. We now have a track record of providing products for diseases where there was no product before. Our mindset is to discover things for unmet medical
needs.”
Versatile” probably isn’t a word you’d generally associate with pharmacological therapies. You wouldn’t take a cold medicine to treat high blood pressure, for example.
“ But Incyte is banking on the fact that some treatments can, in fact be just that: versatile.
The Wilmington-based company isn’t quite trying to get people to take aspirin to cure a cough. But it has come up with a way to take therapies it has developed to fight cancer and apply them to the treatment of other diseases, specifically in the field of dermatology. Although the company’s scientists didn’t intend for this to happen when they began research into means of fighting cancer, they have realized in recent years that their discoveries have multiple applications.
“What we did a few years ago is have a group of biologists look at mechanisms identified through cancer research and see how they can be applied to other applications outside cancer,” says Incyte CEO HERVE HOPPENOT.
The results have been so encouraging that Incyte created a new dermatology division. It makes sense that there would be some crossover, since many cancer treatments being developed now are less focused on trying to eradicate the disease and more intent on helping the body tap into its own ability to fight it.
“The big shift is now in how cancer is managed,” Hoppenot says. “We now know that different types of cancer — breast, lung, prostate — have certain drivers that can thrive due to a lack of an immune response. By removing what is broken in the immune system, we can ignite the immune system and stop cancer’s machinery from working.”
Hoppenot says that the skin is the body’s “largest immune organ,” so the therapies that have been designed to jump-start
HERVE HOPPENOT
—Michael Bradley
Lignolix: EFinding New Uses for a Waste Product
RIC GOTTLIEB likes to Over the past two years, Lignolix, which is located in describe lignin as something the Delaware Innovation Space, has used technology it has like an unfortunate office developed to take large amounts of lignin, break them into mate: “It smells bad, and it’s smaller, more manageable units, and sell them to clients who
difficult to work with.” use them for a variety of applications, including adhesives
ERIC GOTTLIEB
That doesn’t sound like the most ringing endorsement for the substance, which is a byproduct of the pulping process when wood
is made into paper, and a leftover
and various cosmetic products.
Gottlieb is a PhD who founded the company with Chief
Technology Officer Robert O’Dea, Lead Scientist Elvis Ekibade and Chief Security Officer Thomas Epps, PhD. All four have ties to the University of Delaware (UD). Lignolix (pronounced lig-NOL-ix) uses a scalable catalytic process developed in Epps’ laboratory at UD that can turn plant (Continued on page 72)
product in the brewing of beer. But lignin is surprisingly versatile, as the work of Gottlieb’s company, Lignolix, shows.
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