This new field of drug discovery, highlighted by Dr Roger Sabbadini, Chief Scientific Officer of Lpath, focuses on the study of bioactive lipids and their roles in both normal and pathological signaling pathways.

Since cancer cells have lost their ability to divide in a controlled manner, by influencing cell division the growth of tumors can be halted.

Dr Sabbadini states that it is possible to generate therapeutic antibodies that selectively bind to bioactive lipids, stopping them from binding to receptors in cancerous cells, effectively blocking their growth mechanisms.

Lpath has recently published results showing that its proprietary antibody, Sphingomab, binds a lipid that has been observed to control cancer growth. The sphingosine-1-phosphate (S1P) lipid regulates cell growth, cell survival, cell invasion and new blood cell formation.

One of the major hurdles with dealing with these problems is the handling of the very insoluble lipids, which cannot be manipulated using standard protein-focused techniques.

Recently, pre-clinical animal studies have shown that this proprietary antibody slows tumor progression and associated new blood cell growth in several animal models of human cancer. A major advantage of targeting bioactive lipids is that, unlike many protein targets, lipid structures do not change significantly between species, suggesting that the efficacy of these trials should show a better correlation to results observed in humans.

Sabbadini claims "there may be over 1,000 members of the lipidome, providing many new potential targets for therapeutic interventions."