A new study has shown that when a gene is mutated and its copy number is altered, the risk of that gene contributing to the development of cancer increases. Although it was already known that both variations together promoted cancer, it had not been described how the link between the two leads to the progression of tumors and what implications it had on the genetics of cancer.

The overexpression of the MYC oncogene could be explained through a new pathway that would act before transcription, when MYC binds to DNA. A group of scientists from Spain have identified how the ERK2 kinase interacted with the CDK9 protein, enabling it to bind to DNA in the promoter region of MYC.

Investigators at Edinburgh University have discovered that the stem cell transcription factor SALL4 can recognize and bind to short AT-rich motifs across the genome and downregulate genes that are present in AT rich regions.

In less than a year, Scorpion Therapeutics Inc. has raised about $270 million and just closed on an oversubscribed series B financing that climbed to $162 million. The new financing quickly follows the Boston-based company’s founding at the end of the first quarter of 2020 and the closure of a $108 million series A financing in October.

LONDON – Myricx Pharma Ltd. has launched with £4.5 million (US$5.9 million) seed funding to advance a new approach to targeting Myc, an oncogene that has defied long years of effort to drug it. The company will take a synthetic lethal approach, developing small-molecule inhibitors of N-myristoyltransferase to perturb pathways that Myc drives, causing cancer cell death.