Publications

This review focuses on targeting spleen tyrosine kinase (SYK) and Bruton’s tyrosine kinase (BTK) inhibitors as potential immunomodulatory agents for the treatment of autoimmune and inflammatory disorders with SYK inhibition showing encouraging efficacy in patients with RA. The paper describes the role of SYK and BTK in several therapy areas including autoimmune diseases, allergic inflammatory disorders and haematological cancers as well as their role in innate immunity and regulators of adaptive immunity. An overview of the development of fostamatinib including results from the phase I and phase II trials as well as the pre-clinical development of SYK/BTK inhibitors is presented. The relevance of the SYK–BTK axis is shown over a wide range of disease models, and it is concluded that this presents a novel therapeutic area to target