Investigators at the National Institute of Biological Sciences in Beijing and China Agricultural University have identified mixed lineage kinase domain-like protein as an important player in diabetic neuropathy.
A potential $1.9 billion-plus deal with Amgen Inc. in hand, Generate Biomedicines Inc. CEO Michael Nally said his firm’s approach “can take a couple of years off traditional complex protein design” by way of combining in silico work with wet lab capabilities. The pact brought $50 million up front for Cambridge, Mass.-based Generate, with the bigger money possible on the back end plus royalties on any resulting products.
By cataloging protein-protein interactions in cell lines, and combining their results with in vivo studies as well as publicly available data, scientists have defined new interactions that could be used diagnostically, and/or harnessed, for well-studied cancer drivers and more obscure proteins alike.
Researchers at Google AI company Deepmind and the European Molecular Biology Laboratory/European Bioinformatics Institute have developed and published an open-access database with predicted structures of 98.5% of proteins in the human proteome.
Stablix Therapeutics Inc. has raised $63 million in series A funding to pioneer a novel class of small-molecule drugs, designed to selectively stabilize proteins that would otherwise undergo degradation in the ubiquitin-proteasome system (UPS). It represents what its founding investors consider the first company focused on inhibiting the UPS in a target-specific fashion.
Eikon Therapeutics Inc., a startup leveraging advanced optics and machine learning to track protein dynamics for drug discovery, has closed a $148 million series A financing. Led by a high-profile CEO, former Merck & Co. Inc. R&D chief Roger Perlmutter, and with the counsel of two Nobel prize winners, its team is working to "expand the druggable proteome by targeting protein dynamics directly."
Researchers from the State University of New York at Albany have identified small molecules that could inhibit intein self-splicing from the protein PrP8 in the fungal pathogens Cryptococcus neoformans and Cryptococcus gattii, emerging pathogens that can cause fungal meningitis in immunocompromised patients.
Two very different roles were reported for the protein REST last week. In adults, REST activation appeared to extend lifespan by reducing overall brain activity. Principal investigator Bruce Yankner, professor of genetics at Harvard Medical School and co-director of the Paul F. Glenn Center for the Biology of Aging, told BioWorld that in postmortem brain samples of individuals who had had no cognitive impairments at the time of their death, his team found "a correlation between down-regulation of excitation and extended longevity."
