£3.5M Wellcome funding for oral treatment for spinal cord injury

Grant

The Wellcome Trust has awarded a second Seeding Drug Discovery Award to Jonathan Corcoran of the Wolfson Centre for Age Related Diseases at King’s College London, to develop new drugs that can be taken orally to treat spinal cord injury.

Spinal cord injury (SCI) causes damage to the nerves that carry signals from the spine to the brain resulting in reduced mobility or feeling and, in severe cases, partial or total paralysis. There are currently no therapies available that can repair the damaged nerves to recover function and mobility.

Corcoran’s group has previously shown that small molecules called retinoids can stimulate nerves to grow back, by inducing a specific pattern of protein expression in the injured nerve cells. This can lead to functional recovery in rodent models.

The award, valued at £3.5 million over 42 months, will support the team in identifying a retinoid drug candidate, which can be taken into a clinical trial of SCI patients in the third year.

Corcoran said, “We have spent many years showing the utility of retinoids in axonal outgrowth and I am delighted that the Wellcome Trust have funded this research to take a small molecule from the bench all the way into the clinic.”

Corcoran's first award, which has a year left to run, was for £3.1 million to develop small molecules for the treatment of Alzheimer's disease. The project has already generated intellectual property, which the team are hoping to commercialise.