Patent landscape highlighting therapeutic implications of peptides targeting myristoylated alanine-rich protein kinase-C substrate (MARCKS)

ABSTRACT

Introduction

MARCKS protein, a protein kinase C (PKC) substrate, is known to be at the intersection of several intracellular signaling pathways and plays a pivotal role in cellular physiology. Unlike PKC inhibitors, MARCKS-targeting drug (BIO-11006) has shown early success in clinical trials involving lung diseases. Recent research investigations have identified two MARCKS-targeting peptides which possess multifaceted implications against asthma, cancer, inflammation, and lung diseases.

Areas covered

This review article provides the patent landscape and recent developments on peptides targeting MARCKS for therapeutic purposes. Online free open-access databases were used to fetch out the patent information, and research articles were fetched using PubMed.

Expert opinion

Research studies highlighting the intriguing role of MARCKS in human disease and physiology have dramatically increased in recent years. A similar increasing trend in the number of patents has also been observed related to the MARCKS-targeting peptides. Thus, there is a need to amalgamate and translate such a trend into therapeutic intervention. Our review article provides an overview of such recent advances, and we believe that our compilation will fetch the interest of researchers around the globe to develop MARCKS-targeting peptides in future for human diseases.

KEYWORDS:

• Protein kinase C signaling
• MARCKS
• therapeutic peptides
• recent patent
• drug discovery

Article highlights

• MARCKS protein is a critical mediator of cellular signaling and physiology.

• MARCKS protein is known to play a decisive role in lung injury, asthma, inflammation, and metastatic cancer.

• Recent patents have identified MANS and MPS as MARCKS-targeting peptides with therapeutic efficacy against asthma, uveitis, and metastatic lung cancer.

• MANS peptide, MPS peptide, and their fragments have been shown to inhibit the phosphorylation of MARCKS without affecting its total expression.

• Treatment with MPS peptide has been shown to sensitize erlotinib-resistant cancer cells toward erlotinib.

• MPS peptide-derived drug BIO-11006 has shown clinical efficacy (Phase II) in reducing lung metastasis of Ewing's sarcoma and Osteosarcoma; overproduction of mucus and inflammation in COPD patients.

Declaration of interests

The authors have no relevant affiliations or financial involvement with any organization or entity with a financial interest in or financial conflict with the subject matter or materials discussed in the manuscript. This includes employment, consultancies, honoraria, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, grants or patents received or pending, or royalties.

Reviewer disclosures

Peer reviewers on this manuscript have no relevant financial or other relationships to disclose.

Author contribution statement

V Yadav visualized the current idea and gathered patent-related information. AK Sharma, G Parashar, NC Parashar, and S Ramniwas contributed toward the drafting and finalization of the manuscript. MK Jena, HS Tuli, K Yadav contributed toward the literature survey. V Yadav and HS Tuli supervised and contributed to the final framework of the article. V Yadav created the figures. V Yadav and MK Jena contributed to the manuscript revisions. All authors approved the final version of the manuscript.

Additional information

Funding

This paper was not funded.