Rheos Medicines Announces Publication of Perspective in Cell Metabolism Highlighting the Rationale and Potential of Employing Principles of Immunometabolism to Discover and Develop Novel Medicines

Rheos Medicines, a biopharmaceutical company harnessing insights in immunometabolism to create a new class of therapeutics for patients with severe autoimmune disorders, inflammatory diseases and cancer, today announced the online publication of a perspective in Cell Metabolism that highlights the rationale and potential of employing principles of immunometabolism to discover and develop novel medicines. The article, entitled The Untapped Opportunity and Challenge of Immunometabolism: A New Paradigm for Drug Discovery, was published online today in Cell Metabolism (DOI: 10.1016/j.cmet.2019.11.014).

Immune cells modulate their energy requirements in response to changes in their environment, which include interactions with pathogens, tumor cells, other immune system cells and molecules such as growth factors and antibodies. The metabolic programs that are induced or inhibited as immune cells respond to such stimuli can drive immune cell activation, differentiation, or suppression. Understanding the mechanisms through which metabolism can dictate the function or fate of immune cells is a new platform for target and biomarker discovery with a goal of identifying new medicines with potential to selectively tune the immune system to amplify or dampen its response. The perspective reviewed the underlying biology of immunometabolism and the new tools to discover and develop novel therapeutics based on this paradigm.

"To exploit this new field of immunometabolism, we have developed and industrialized a platform that comprehensively elucidates the metabolic pathways and targets with potential to control immune cell fate or function, as well as their associated metabolite biomarkers," said Laurence Turka, M.D., Chief Scientific Officer and co-founder of Rheos. "Our approach employs a proprietary integration of metabolomic, transcriptomic, and other data to generate immunometabolism network maps (imMAPstm) that characterize immune cell activation and differentiation through a metabolic lens. Our imMAPs have potential to tap currently undiscovered or poorly understood biology and enable development of new therapeutics for a wide range of diseases including autoimmunity and cancer."

Barbara Fox, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer of Rheos, added, "Immunometabolism has the potential to be the next frontier in drug discovery. Our pioneering product engine has the breadth and power to identify novel metabolic targets across a diverse set of pathways, better understand the metabolic impact of existing therapies and bring the benefits of personalized medicine to autoimmunity. Based on our work to-date, we have initiated drug discovery efforts in a number of programs and we look forward to providing further updates as we continue to make progress."

About Rheos Medicines

Rheos Medicines is a biopharmaceutical company harnessing insights in immunometabolism to develop novel therapeutics for patients with severe autoimmune disorders, inflammatory diseases and cancer. Our approach targets the underlying intracellular metabolism of immune cells and has the potential to unlock a new frontier in drug discovery for immune-mediated disease. Through a proprietary platform and product engine that integrates multiple "omic" datasets, we systematically define the biologic links between immune cell metabolism and function and simultaneously identify new drug targets and biomarkers of disease to bring precision to the treatment of immune-mediated diseases. We have assembled leading scientists whose discoveries opened the field of immunometabolism, clinicians with a deep understanding of immune-mediated diseases, and an experienced biotech leadership team. Rheos was founded by Third Rock Ventures and is located in Cambridge, MA. For more information, please visit www.rheosrx.com.