ChEMBL

Another kinase inhibitor mystery solved! I (jpo) feel like I'm turning into a rotund Hercule Poirot, except English and with a huge fat wirey 'tache.

The literature has quite a few references to an Trk inhibitor in phase 2 trials from Cephalon - CEP-2583; just do a google search with something like "CEP-2583 clinical trial" and you'll come across a number of references to this, usually in the peer-reviewed literature. However, this is really the only place is occurs, try clinicaltrials.gov, Cephalon regulatory filings, Teva pipeline, nothing.

However, this small letter to Journal of Urology (DOI:s10.1097/01.ju.0000138215.70709.9c) solves the mystery clinical candidate - it was a typo, it was meant to refer to CEP-2563/CEP-701 (a prodrug/drug pair), and so a simple transcription error (8 for 6), and then repetition across other reviews (who I guess trusted the primary source) gave a footprint to the existence of a clinically interesting asset, that never was.

What to do with these sort of errors in the literature, the are too minor for journals to ever worry about fixing, but arguably they should if bought to their attention. But of course, post-publication peer review should also fix this. So I'll make some comments on pubmedcommons when I have some time. It was good of Cephalon to correct the record in this way.

jpo, Bissan, and Krister