During the 1990s, medicinal chemist Anders Hallberg was working in his lab at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry. He was exploring a hormonal system in the body that regulates blood pressure, among other things, by designing different molecules. Thirty years later, one of these molecules has been developed into a drug candidate to treat a severe and incurable disease, idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, and is now being tested on patients in multiple countries.
"As we have seen in clinical trials, what our substance does is improve lung capacity in patients. On average, a couple of people die each day in Sweden from this rare disease ," says Hallberg, emeritus professor at the Department of Medicinal Chemistry and former Vice-Chancellor of Uppsala University. When developing and designing these different molecules, there was initially no aim to target any specific disease.
The focus for Hallberg and his colleagues was primarily to better understand a hormonal system in the body called the renin-angiotensin system (RAS). It regulates blood pressure and fluid balance but is also involved in a variety of other functions in the body. The research group wanted to see if they could switch functions in the RAS on and off with the help of specially designed small molecules .
Molecules activating only the AT2 receptor In particular, they were interested in being able to steer and activate the angiotensin II type 2 receptor (AT2 receptor), which is one of two receptors in the RAS. Its fu.