1 August 2022 - - US-based biotechnology company Vicinitas Therapeutics has launched with USD 65m in series A financing, the company said.

The financing was co-led by a16z and Deerfield Management, with participation from Droia Ventures, GV, The Mark Foundation for Cancer Research and the Berkeley Catalyst Fund.

Vicinitas Therapeutics is a spin-out company that resulted from the Deubiquitinase Targeting Chimera (DUBTAC) platform, which was developed through an academic-industry research collaboration between the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley.

Many diseases, including cancer and monogenic diseases, are often caused by specific proteins that are abnormally degraded and lost from the cell.

In cancer, protective tumor suppressors are aberrantly destroyed, allowing cancer cells to circumvent cell death, thus promoting unobstructed cell proliferation. In monogenic disorders, mutations in certain genes cause the resulting protein to become unstable and degraded, which leads to abnormally low levels of the particular protein and the disease pathology.

To date, many aberrantly degraded proteins have been considered "undruggable" or intractable to drug discovery efforts, and patients with these diseases would greatly benefit from a therapeutic that stabilizes and restores the levels of these proteins, allowing normal function to be restored.

The DUBTAC platform was developed to therapeutically target these degraded proteins by removing ubiquitin chains (tags on proteins that signal the cell to degrade and eliminate the protein using the cell's protein disposal system) from specific proteins to stop their degradation and stabilize their levels for therapeutic benefit.

DUBTACs, developed through an academic-industry research collaboration between Professor Daniel Nomura, his research group at UC Berkeley and scientists at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research, are bifunctional small molecules consisting of a protein-targeting ligand connected via a linker to a deubiquitinase recruiter.

In a unique application of induced-proximity biology, DUBTACs bring a DUB into the vicinity of a ubiquitin-tagged protein to remove the ubiquitin chain and subsequently prevent degradation of the target protein.

In a hallmark study published in Nature Chemical Biology, Dr. Nomura, the Nomura Lab and Novartis colleagues discovered covalent allosteric recruiters against OTUB1, a known DUB.

They showed that this covalent OTUB1 recruiter could be linked to various protein-targeting ligands to stabilize the levels of aberrantly degraded proteins, including the mutated chloride channel CFTR that causes cystic fibrosis and the tumor suppressor WEE1 kinase in cancer cells.

Vicinitas Therapeutics has exclusively licensed the DUBTAC platform from both UC Berkeley and Novartis and aims to become the company in targeted protein stabilization by developing next-generation disease therapies against an entire class of previously inaccessible aberrantly degraded proteins.

The company is initially focused on developing therapies in cancer and monogenic diseases.

The Vicinitas Therapeutics team is comprised of scientific leaders from academia and industry who have demonstrated years of commitment and success in the field, and who remain dedicated to advancing science and technology and delivering highly impactful drugs.

Vicinitas Therapeutics is a biotechnology company focused on targeted protein stabilizers known as Deubiquituinase Targeting Chimeras (DUBTACs).

The company's mission is to use this proprietary technology to solve critical problems in human health by developing next-generation disease therapies against an entire class of previously inaccessible disease-causing proteins.

Spun out of technology that was developed through an academic-industry collaboration between Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research and researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, Vicinitas Therapeutics is based in South San Francisco, California.