For decades, the pharmaceutical industry has sought to develop targeted, personalized treatments to better serve individual patients. However, the reality of precision medicine has remained elusive due to challenges in efficiently delivering drugs to the desired tissues and cells. A groundbreaking new approach focused on revolutionizing end-to-end drug delivery for inflammatory diseases may finally make this a reality.
Inflammation is the underlying driver of numerous deadly and debilitating chronic conditions. For years, we’ve been waging war against threats like cancer, heart disease and neurodegeneration. However, it’s becoming clear that these deadly conditions share a common enemy within the body - chronic inflammation. Yet current anti-inflammatory treatments are often blunt instruments, suppressing entire immune pathways which can leave patients vulnerable to infections, toxic side effects and accelerating illness, sometimes even death.
A convergence of innovative technologies aims to change this by precisely guiding potent anti-inflammatory drugs to their intended targets while using emerging biomarker technologies as a means of measuring rates of personal response toward inflammatory mediators. While novel compounds are the often expected Big Pharma discovery route, researchers in entrepreneurial or “small pharma” companies are actively engaging with new tools (i.e. artificial intelligence, cross-disciplinary science collaboration) to repurpose and combine existing small molecules into new, optimized therapeutic regimens as part of this end-to-end delivery system.
“Inflammation is a protective mechanism. One that’s meant to be a short-term innate immune response,” explains Jackie Iversen, pharmacist and Chief Clinical Officer at the life sciences startup, Sen-Jam Pharmaceutical. “But when it rages chronically and doesn’t resolve in that finite period, it can wreak havoc on nearly every part of the body.”
While acute inflammation from injury or infection is necessary for healing, persistent, low-grade inflammation generates a stream of inflammatory molecules that slowly degrade and destroy healthy cells and tissues over time. This sinister phenomenon has been implicated in:
Heart Disease: Inflammatory molecules promote plaque buildup in arteries, increasing heart attack and stroke risk.
Cancer: Smoldering inflammation can spur tumor development and create an immunosuppressive environment for cancers to thrive.
Alzheimer’s/Dementia: Brain inflammation is a key driver of neuronal death and cognitive decline.
Diabetes: Persistent inflammation reduces insulin sensitivity and disrupts metabolic regulation
Autoimmune Diseases: Autoinflammatory reactions underlie the body attacking its own tissues in lupus, rheumatoid arthritis, Crohn’s and more.
There is growing evidence that inflammation is the culprit in depression, frailty and overall accelerated aging. In fact, some innovative thought leaders, such as Iversen and her international science colleagues, believe chronic inflammation is at the root of most of the diseases and health conditions crippling Americans today. Iversen continues: “Sadly, research tells us that almost three out of every five adults in America are walking around with unchecked chronic inflammation, often unwittingly, since on average it takes approximately seven years for patients to get diagnosed with many of these conditions.”
Dr. Ashley St. John, a visionary Immunologist with Duke-National University of Singapore agrees. “With many conditions that involve runaway inflammation, what we need therapeutically are more sophisticated methods to take the foot off the gas pedal.”
What triggers all this destructive inflammation? Poor diet, lack of exercise, obesity, chronic infections, environmental toxins, and even stress can push the body into this self-destructive state over time. It’s as if our modern lifestyles have created the perfect storm of inflammatory inducers. The result of which is an endless feedback loop of systemic inflammation that piles on, worsening as we age.
Luckily, science is catching up to this runaway train.
Today, a revolutionary approach is emerging that could offer us the key to stopping this destructive force. By leveraging innovative delivery systems, powerful anti-inflammatory compounds can be precisely guided to sources of chronic inflammation in the body while avoiding systemic side effects.
Sen-Jam Pharmaceutical’s vision is to modulate the immune system to ensure an individual has the healthiest and most long-lasting immune competency possible. Arguably, the biggest advance in anti-inflammatories in the last 125 years since aspirin was invented, Sen-Jam treats inflammation at the root source by modulating mast cells. In this way, the innovative startup quells inflammation well before tissue damage and disease cause disability, which is where the large majority of today’s products work, when the problem has injured vitality irreversibly.
In order to rapidly bring therapeutics through the FDA approval process, Sen-Jam has taken its immunomodulating anti-inflammatory and combined it with a NSAID for maximal inflammation and pain reducing effects, while protecting the GI tract from NSAID induced GI injury. Sen-Jam is pursuing indications, both OTC and Rx, for upper respiratory infections, substance use disorders to reduce dependence and withdrawal, and their product to reduce the toxic effects of alcohol consumption. Their early stage proof of concept studies show an efficacy of reducing pain and inflammation of approximately 50%. Sen-Jam has 4 lead products in or near Phase 2 studies, with several more in the pipeline.
One of the most interesting aspects of their platform technology is how they are addressing premature aging. Sen-Jam is combining their therapeutics with cutting-edge inflammatory biomarkers to allow for precision medicine to be realized in this massive field of diseases caused by runaway inflammation. Emerging biomarkers allow anti-inflammatory drugs, and immunomodulators, via repurposed combination regimens, to be packaged into “molecular missiles” that can seek out and neutralize inflammatory fires with surgical precision. Having this level of control could stop or prevent many diseases in their inflammatory tracks while radically extending health spans.
As chronic inflammation is increasingly implicated as the nefarious force behind many of the most deadly and debilitating conditions, the emerging field of targeted anti-inflammatory therapies through precision medicine may be the key to finally extinguishing this silent killer and ushering in a new frontier of health. And Sen-Jam may just hold the keys we need.