One of the unresolved questions in medical immunology is the inter-relation of inflammation, the immune response, and disease. The debate over the role of inflammation in disease dates back the mid-nineteenth century. Our research examines one of the central questions of this debate - the host response to cell injury.

TherimuneX Pharmaceuticals, Inc. is a drug discovery and development company located at the Pennsylvania Biotechnology Center in Doylestown, PA. The Company's drug development platform relates to our discovery of a new family of endogenous lipopeptides and their immune regulating properties. Induced in response to cell injury, these peptides activate the innate arm of the immune response. This discovery has enabled us to directly relate cell injury to the pro-inflammatory immune cascade and formulate a model for the immunopathology underlying many human diseases.

Hospital-Acquired Infections. TherimuneX is developing a new class of 'pathogen agnostic' anti-infective agents for the prevention of hospital-acquired infections. The Center for Disease Control reports that more people die in the U.S. from hospital-acquired infections than AIDS. The economic burden to the U.S. health-care system arising from hospital-acquired infections has been estimated at more than $300 Billion annually.  Hospital acquired infections are no longer being reimbursed by Medicare and thus has created an additional economic incentive for U.S. hospitals to adopt products that can address this issue.

Hepatitis B. We are also developing a new class of drug for the treatment of chronic Hepatitis B Virus (HBV) infection. Chronic HBV leads to liver fibrosis and liver cancer that is the third leading cause of cancer deaths. Chronic HBV affects 1 million people in the U.S. and an estimated 300-500 million people worldwide. A recent NIH Consensus Statement on HBV determined that of the seven drugs approved for the treatment of HBV, none had significant long-term effect on chronic disease.

Alzheimer's Disease. C. pneumoniae (Cp) is a persistent obligate intracellular pathogen that infects human monocytes and has recently been identified as a major etiological factor in late-onset Alzheimer's disease. We have identified a lead drug candidate that effectively clears persistent Cp infected human monocytes. These results were presented at the International Conference on Alzheimer's Disease (July 11, 2010).

Scleroderma. Scleroderma is a chronic fibrotic disease with no known cause and affecting 300,000 patients (mostly women) in the U.S. Our research has discovered a specific antagonist of the inflammasome that down regulates collagen and caspase-1 production in skin fibroblasts from Scleroderma patients. We are developing this antagonist as a potential new drug for the treatment of Scleroderma. These results have been presented at the American Association of Immunologists conference in Baltimore, MD (May 10, 2010).