Angela Koehler, an associate professor of biological engineering at MIT, has made it her mission to find ways to drug “undruggable” targets. By taking aim at proteins that interact with these targets, she can indirectly disable them or reduce their impact.
Aum Biosciences is moving on to oncology turf targeted by companies including Bayer and Roche, securing $27 million to take inhibitors of MNK and TRK into midphase clinical trials.
Riding a growing interest in protein degradation, researchers at the Indiana University School of Medicine identified a small-molecule degrader for a cancer-promoting target called SUMO1, which was previously considered "undruggable." The compound inhibited tumor growth in mouse models of human breast, colon and lung cancers being developed by startup HB Therapeutics.