Arvinas and Macroceutics Establish DEL Screening Collaboration on Undruggable Targets

NEW HAVEN, Conn. and MONMOUTH JUNCTION, N.J., Nov. 21, 2017 /PRNewswire/ -- Arvinas LLC, a private biotechnology company creating a new class of drugs based on protein degradation, and Macroceutics, Inc., today announced the establishment of a multi-target collaboration intended to deliver new chemical matter against undruggable biological targets to feed Arvinas' PROTAC discovery platform.  Under the terms of the agreement, Arvinas will access Macroceutics' DNA-Encoded chemical Libraries ("DEL") to identify binders to multiple targets, which have been historically undruggable through protein inhibition.  Financial terms of the collaboration were not disclosed. 

"The DEL approach will allow us to find new, unexplored compound binding sites that can be utilized by the PROTAC platform to create potent selective degraders and to access targets that have previously been considered undruggable," said John Houston, Ph.D., President and Chief Executive Officer of Arvinas.  "This collaboration will allow us to continue to expand our pipeline of small molecule protein degraders in new disease areas."

With multiple protein targets, Arvinas' PROTAC platform has demonstrated that a transient binding event at a range of binding sites and affinities can translate into very potent degradation of the target protein.  This feature of the PROTAC platform will allow Arvinas to rapidly create potent degraders against undruggable targets from the chemical matter identified in the Macroceutics DEL screening process.

"We are excited to initiate this collaboration with Arvinas as a leader and innovator in targeted protein degradation," said Kenneth Carson, Ph.D., CEO of Macroceutics.  "The combination of our diverse and drug-like molecules with Arvinas' targets and approach will help to advance new, best-in-class drugs to provide new and innovative solutions for unmet medical need."

About Arvinas

Arvinas is a pharmaceutical company focused on developing new small molecules ? known as PROTACs (PROteolysis TArgeting Chimeras) ? aimed at degrading disease-causing cellular proteins via proteolysis. Based on innovative research conducted at Yale University by Dr. Craig Crews, Founder and Chief Scientific Advisor, the company is translating natural protein degradation approaches into novel drugs for the treatment of cancer and other diseases. The proprietary PROTAC-based drug paradigm induces protein degradation, rather than protein inhibition, facilitating the ubiquitin proteasome system and offers the advantage of potentially targeting "undruggable" as well as "druggable" elements of the proteome. This greatly expands the ability to create drugs for many new, previously unapproachable targets. For more information on Arvinas, visit: www.arvinas.com.

About Macroceutics

Macroceutics is a privately-owned biotechnology company based in central New Jersey.  Macroceutics has made multiple large DNA-Encoded Libraries (DELs) with extremely robust chemistry processes and established a fully-functional DEL target-screening platform.  The available screening collection encompasses hundreds of highly diverse scaffolds, and the compounds exhibit very drug-like physical properties.  For further information on Macroceutics, visit: www.macroceutics.com.

SOURCE Arvinas