Chemistry gets a boost at the TB Alliance with the arrival of the seasoned medicinal chemist Dr. Takushi Kaneko. Kaneko joins the Alliance after 30 years of pharmaceutical industry experience at Bristol-Myers Squibb and Pfizer, where he worked in the drug discovery programs in anti-bacterials, cancer chemotherapy, and natural products. Most recently he was at Pfizer's Global Research and Development site in Groton, CT, working in antibiotic medicinal chemistry with a special focus on macrolide antibiotics.
At the TB Alliance, Kaneko sees an opportunity to bring rigorous medicinal chemistry to a disease that has not been a traditional subject for large pharmaceutical companies. "For neglected diseases, what was done before was to find a drug that big pharmaceutical companies decided not to pursue for their interests and to develop it further for a neglected disease," he says. "But what we need is a dedicated discovery effort to find completely new drugs. That is what the TB Alliance and its partnerships make possible."
After high school in Hiroshima, Japan, Kaneko came to the United States on a scholarship. In his studies, Kaneko was drawn to synthetic organic chemistry because of the potential for creativity. "Synthetic organic chemistry is like an art," he says. "You generate previously non-existing molecules that have unknown properties." The creativity must be mixed with hard work, however, as even a small variation of conditions can make or break an experiment, and lots of small variations must be tested to find the right combination.
The payoff is the ability to test a hypothesis. "If you hypothesize, for example, that a certain part of the molecule is causing toxicity problems, a chemist can make the new molecule with this part altered to test the hypothesis," he says. "This is not something that biologists or physicists can necessarily do."
Another of Kaneko's passions is natural product chemistry, based in part on his postdoctoral work with Prof. Yoshito Kishi at Harvard University (Cambridge, MA). In this area of chemistry, scientists try to find drug leads from plant materials or microbial fermentation products. Kaneko firmly believes that the field of natural products is coming back after being pushed aside by more recent techniques such as combinatorial chemistry and high-throughput screening. "At the very least, natural products will be one of the major tools used for lead identification in the future," Kaneko predicts.
After tackling many different projects at Bristol-Myers and Pfizer, Kaneko knows that drug discovery is not easy. "It is really a challenging task to put all the desired properties into one molecule, including efficacy, safety, convenience of administration, and low cost-of-goods. That is my humble realization after so many years," he says. "It also requires the collaboration of many different scientists."
Kaneko believes that this collaboration, and his role in it, can lead to an even bigger impact at the TB Alliance. "Being in a big pharma company has certain advantages but sometimes you do not see a quick result. In an organization like the TB Alliance, I hope it is more like sailing a yacht, where every crew member's contribution is critical for the outcome."
As for tackling a new disease target, Kaneko welcomes the intellectual challenge. His broader chemical effort against Mycobacterium tuberculosis will ensure that the entry to the TB drug pipeline continues to be fed with promising drug candidates - candidates that may one day become part of a life-saving cure for the millions with TB.