Corvus Pharmaceuticals announces data on potential of ITK inhibition

Corvus Pharmaceuticals announced data published by leading researchers from Cornell University in Science Signaling, a peer-reviewed journal, that further corroborates Corvus’ views of the potential of ITK inhibition as a novel approach to treating inflammatory diseases. Researchers at Cornell utilized soquelitinib, the Company’s selective ITK inhibitor, to demonstrate in vitro and in vivo that ITK inhibition induces switching of proinflammatory Th17 cells into anti-inflammatory Treg suppressor cells. The article states “The findings of this study provide greater insight into how ITK controls the Th17 and Treg dichotomy, and these findings could have broader implications for immune disorders with an imbalance of Th17 and Treg.” Key results from the third-party preclinical studies described in the article demonstrated that soquelitinib had the following observed effects in vitro and in in vivo models of inflammatory disease: ITK controls the switch between Th17 and Foxp3+ Treg cells; In in vitro experiments, ITK inhibition with soquelitinib results in dose dependent inhibition of Th17 cell differentiation along with an increase in Foxp3+ Treg cells; Switched Foxp3+ Treg cells suppress naive T cell proliferation and behave like true Treg cells; Soquelitinib treatment of mice with allergic airway inflammation significantly reduced the percentage of Th17 cells in the lung resulting in an increase in the ratio of Treg to Th17 cells