“We are incredibly excited to start this long-term collaboration with Merck, a globally recognized player in the pharmaceutical industry that shares our drive towards dynamic innovation for the benefit of patients. The partnership validates the unique potential of Proxygen’s glue degrader platform and strategically leverages our common strengths in the targeted protein degradation field,” says Dr. Bernd Boidol, CEO of Proxygen.
Molecular glue degraders re-direct the cell’s own quality control machinery towards disease-causing proteins, inducing their selective and complete elimination. Because of their capability to modulate protein classes that would not be amenable to traditional drug discovery approaches, glue degraders hold the promise of unlocking a large proportion of the undruggable target space and delivering innovative therapies for diseases with high medical need. The lack of scalable discovery strategies has however so far hindered the full exploitation of the clinical potential of molecular glue degraders.
By streamlining and fully integrating cutting-edge genomic, proteomic, and biochemical technologies, Proxygen has successfully developed a highly versatile glue degrader discovery engine. The ligase-agnostic screening approach enables the specific and unbiased identification of molecular glue degraders against difficult-to-drug or completely undruggable targets at large scale. The vast amounts of know-how and data generated in the discovery and chemical optimization of degrader molecules continuously improve the understanding of this novel modality and contribute to Proxygen’s pioneering role in the molecular glue degrader space.