KinoPharma and National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology Launch Collaborative Research Project for Exploring New Drug Development for Alzheimer's Disease

KinoPharma, Inc., and the National Institutes for Quantum and Radiological Science and Technology are pleased to announce that they have entered a contract for collaborative research on efficacy evaluation of the compound KPO1143, developed by KinoPharma, to prevent the accumulation of protein called tau (hereafter "tau protein") (*1), which is considered a cause of Alzheimer's disease (AD). The National Institutes' research group is led by MD & PhD Makoto Higuchi from the Department of Functional Brain Imaging Research of the National Institute of Radiological Sciences (NIRS).

Background and objectives of R&D on AD

Under the public R&D funding of A-STEP by the Japan Science and Technology Agency (JST), KinoPharma, Inc., embarked on research for discovering drugs that can inhibit excessive phosphorylation of tau protein, which may trigger the abnormal aggregation of such protein, and eventually succeeded in acquiring a candidate compound, dubbed KPO1143.

This collaborative research is intended to evaluate the pharmacological actions of KPO1143 as a candidate therapeutic drug for AD by administering the compound to mice with transgenically overexpressed human tau protein, and verifying its inhibitory effects on tau protein accumulation in the living brain, using the PET (*2) tracer technology developed by QST-NIRS.

In the project "Establishment of a research and development consortium on novel imaging diagnostics and therapeutics targeting tau pathologies," offered by the Japan Agency for Medical R&D (AMED), QST-NIRS developed a PET tracer that allows the visualization of tau protein within the living brain. This collaborative research aims to capitalize on the drug discovery platform including the efficacy evaluation system using tau protein as a biomarker.