Regeneron is aiming to provide therapeutics for bone disease.

Osteoporosis, osteoarthritis, and metastatic bone cancer are three of the skeletal diseases that Regeneron scientists are working on. Teams of Regeneron scientists are targeting pathways and genes that affect:

  • Bone formation
  • Homeostasis of the skeleton
  • Diseases where bone health is impacted by other conditions

The teams are striving to define new therapeutic modalities for bone disease, particularly for areas where there are unmet medical needs.

Skeletal Disease Therapeutics Program

The bone group has used VelociGene® to:

  • Develop a systematic program geared toward uncovering the roles of BMP antagonists in bone homeostasis
  • Uncover roles of different signaling pathways at stages of bone development, during bone homeostasis, and while modeling tumor-induced bone cell death
  • Discover new genes that affect the formation and homeostasis of the skeleton
  • Validate candidate drug target genes
  • Generate models of human disease for testing new therapeutics

Novel Approaches for Therapeutic Development

Regeneron bone scientists have obtained proof of principle in vitro of a novel target and are now preclinically testing their first targeted therapeutics in bone formation and reversal of bone loss as test indications.

Highlights

Conditional deletion (right panel) of the gremlin gene in bones reveals an increase (40%) in bone volume compared to normal bones (left). The top images show bone histology, while the bottom images show the rates of bone mineralization. Bone mineralization was marked in green at the first timepoint and then in orange at a later timepoint; and the rate is determined by the distance between the two markings.