A pioneering strategy to treat autoimmune diseases that enables patients to live symptom free

Kaass Discovery, headed by Anita Kaass, is a drug development company awarded best regional start up in 2018 at the regional Innovation Norway´s start up conference. This project aims to deliver a unique therapy for autoimmune disease, which affects 600 million people globally. Our first aim will be to focus on the autoimmune disease rheumatoid arthritis (RA). Today’s biologic drugs often have unacceptable side effects and only 60% efficacy rates. Dr Kåss was intrigued by the improvements in disease activity in several autoimmune diseases during pregnancy and worsening postpartum. Therefore in 2006 she mapped out which hormones were closely related to immune markers. She discovered that it was beneficial to decrease the master hormone of the reproductive hormone, gonadotropin-releasing hormone (GnRH), initiating the first clinical trial of GnRH antagonists in RA, with promising results. GnRH not only regulates the reproductive hormone cells, but also acts on immune cells to regulate inflammatory reactions. However these drugs have the side effect of castration. Our second-generation refined drugs appear to be strongly anti-inflammatory and target only the peripheral GnRH receptor therefore having no reproductive side-effects. We have filed in our patent application 11,500 new peptides that have a range of similar anti-inflammatory activities, and selected the 14 most promising candidates. However this project needs to validate this potential in further in vitro and in vivo safety and efficacy studies, with the eventual aim of out-licensing the drug.