Tick sali­va-de­rived drug shows promise in mid-stage rare skin dis­ease study

Sci­en­tists of­ten lean on na­ture to de­vel­op drugs, for in­stance, the decades-old an­ti­co­ag­u­lant war­farin is de­rived from a chem­i­cal found nat­u­ral­ly in sweet clover and oth­er plants, while the more con­tem­po­rary blood thin­ner An­giomax is a syn­thet­ic form of a com­pound found in leach sali­va. Akari Ther­a­peu­tics, a drug de­vel­op­er based in Lon­don and New York, has tak­en to an­oth­er blood-suck­ing par­a­site — the tick — to treat a range of in­flam­ma­to­ry, rare dis­eases.

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