Targeting effector memory T-cells with Kv1.3 blockers

Heike Wulff1, Michael Pennington

  • 1University of California, Davis, Department of Medical Pharmacology, School of Medicine, Genome and Biomedical Sciences Facility, Davis, CA 95616, USA. hwulff@ucdavis.edu

Current Opinion in Drug Discovery & Development
|July 31, 2007
PubMed

After initially being pursued for general immunosuppression, the voltage-gated potassium channel Kv1.3 has more recently emerged as an attractive pharmacological target for the selective suppression of CCR7- effector memory T-cells in T-cell mediated autoimmune diseases such as multiple sclerosis, type 1 diabetes, rheumatoid arthritis and psoriasis. This article gives a brief summary of the role of Kv1.3 in autoimmune diseases, reviews the progress made in both developing peptidic and small-molecule inhibitors for this challenging target, and in validating Kv1.3 as a target for the treatment of autoimmune diseases.

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