Controlling leukocyte trafficking in disease

The pharmaceutical industry has made amazing progress in developing candidate drugs against the chemokine receptors, bringing agents into clinical trials only a decade after the cloning of the first target (e.g., CCR1 and BX471). These efforts utilizing this strategy continue to expand with an increasing number of chemokine receptor small molecule antagonists entering the clinic each year. Although none have yet made the leap to marketed drug, there is hope that this will be seen soon, especially in the therapeutic area of HIV. It may be that new strategies will be required, however, to see optimum efficacy in preventing leukocyte trafficking. Many of these strategies, such as the viral proteins, are only now making their way into clinical trials. The additional efforts that biologists and medicinal chemists are now placing on promiscuous small molecule antagonists should only increase the potential for market therapeutics that control human disease by controlling leukocyte trafficking.