Plexxikon is an American

drug discovery In the fields of medicine, biotechnology and pharmacology, drug discovery is the process by which new candidate medications are discovered. Historically, drugs were discovered by identifying the active ingredient from traditional remedies or by ...

company based in

South San Francisco, California South San Francisco is a city in San Mateo County, California, United States, located on the San Francisco Peninsula in the San Francisco Bay Area. The city is colloquially known as "South City". The population was 66,105 at the 2020 census. ...

. It was co-founded in 2001 by

Joseph Schlessinger Joseph Schlessinger (born Josip Schlessinger; 26 March 1945) is a Yugoslav-born Israeli- American biochemist and biophysician. He is chair of the Pharmacology Department at Yale University School of Medicine in New Haven, Connecticut, as wel ...

Yale University Yale University is a private research university in New Haven, Connecticut. Established in 1701 as the Collegiate School, it is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States and among the most prestigious in the wo ...

, and

Sung-Hou Kim Kim Sung-Hou (born 1937) is a Korean-born American structural biologist and biophysicist. Kim reported the first 3D structure of tRNA with A. Rich in 1973. He also published many papers on the structures of protein molecules including human Ras, ...

of the

University of California, Berkeley The University of California, Berkeley (UC Berkeley, Berkeley, Cal, or California) is a public land-grant research university in Berkeley, California. Established in 1868 as the University of California, it is the state's first land-grant u ...

. It uses a proprietary structural biology-based platform called Scaffold-Based Drug Discovery to build a pipeline of products in multiple therapeutic areas. This discovery process integrates multiple technologies, including structural screening as one key component, that it hopes will give a significant competitive advantage over other approaches. In April 2011, Plexxikon was acquired by the Japanese pharmaceutical company

Daiichi Sankyo is a global pharmaceutical company and the second-largest pharmaceutical company in Japan. It achieved JPY 981.8 billion in revenue in 2019. The company owns the American biotechnology company Plexxikon, American pharmaceutical company American R ...

for $805 million and an additional $130 million in potential milestone payments. Daiichi Sankyo announced the shutdown of Plexxikon in 2022.

Drug pipeline

Vemurafenib Vemurafenib (INN, marketed as Zelboraf) is an inhibitor of the B-Raf enzyme developed by Plexxikon (now part of Daiichi-Sankyo) and Genentech for the treatment of late-stage melanoma.; The name "vemurafenib" comes from V600E mutated BRAF in ...

(Zelboraf) and

pexidartinib Pexidartinib, sold under the brand name Turalio, is a kinase inhibitor drug for the treatment of adults with symptomatic tenosynovial giant cell tumor (TGCT) associated with severe morbidity or functional limitations and not amenable to improvem ...

(Turalio) are two FDA approved drugs developed by Plexxikon *Plexxikon is collaborating with

Wyeth Pharmaceuticals Wyeth, LLC was an American pharmaceutical company. The company was founded in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, in 1860 as ''John Wyeth and Brother''. It was later known, in the early 1930s, as American Home Products, before being renamed to Wyeth in ...

on several products for use in type II diabetes and other metabolic disorders. The most advanced of these agents is indeglitazar (PLX204), which is currently in Phase II clinical trials for

type 2 diabetes Type 2 diabetes, formerly known as adult-onset diabetes, is a form of diabetes mellitus that is characterized by high blood sugar, insulin resistance, and relative lack of insulin. Common symptoms include increased thirst, frequent urination, ...

. *PLX7486 is a

CSF1R Colony stimulating factor 1 receptor (CSF1R), also known as macrophage colony-stimulating factor receptor (M-CSFR), and CD115 (Cluster of Differentiation 115), is a cell-surface protein encoded by the human ''CSF1R'' gene (known also as c-FMS). CS ...

antagonist and pan-TRK inhibitor in clinical trials for advanced solid tumors.

References

{{Reflist Pharmaceutical companies of the United States Pharmaceutical companies established in 2001 2001 establishments in the United States Health care companies based in California American subsidiaries of foreign companies Daiichi Sankyo