Blueprint Medicines Corporation and Proteovant Therapeutics announced a strategic collaboration to advance novel targeted protein degrader therapies to address important areas of medical need. Targeted protein degradation harnesses the body’s natural protein disposal system and offers the potential to develop new medicines that target historically difficult-to-drug proteins that play an important role in causing serious diseases.
The collaboration will bring together Proteovant’s Artificial Intelligence (AI)-enhanced targeted protein degradation (TPD) platform and Blueprint Medicine’s precision medicine expertise to discover novel targeted protein degraders. The companies will jointly research important targets and advance up to two novel protein degrader therapies into development candidates. As a core part of the collaboration, Proteovant’s exclusive partner for TPD, VantAI, will deploy its leading AI technologies for degrader generation and optimization. Upon designation of a clinical development candidate, Blueprint Medicines has the exclusive option to develop and commercialize products resulting from the collaboration. Proteovant has the option to co-develop and co-commercialize the second of the two Blueprint Medicines-optioned programs in the U.S.
“At Blueprint Medicines, we strive to stay on the cutting edge by identifying emerging precision medicine technologies with potential to complement and further amplify our highly productive research platform,” said Fouad Namouni, M.D., President of Research and Development at Blueprint Medicines. “Recent scientific advancements in the field of targeted protein degradation have revealed opportunities to expand our core kinase capabilities and explore new ways to treat difficult to drug and novel targets, as well as address on-target resistance mechanisms. This collaboration with Proteovant Therapeutics will enable us to expand our platform more quickly in our mission to improve outcomes for patients with cancer and blood disorders.”
“Protein degradation is one of the most promising areas of drug discovery and presents us with the opportunity to discover potent, selective, well-tolerated and potentially more effective therapeutics that can reach previously undruggable targets,” said Drew Fromkin, CEO, Proteovant Therapeutics. “We have created a powerful degrader discovery engine that harnesses the synergies of Proteovant’s deep drug hunting expertise with VantAI’s proprietary AI platform driven by its Protein Contact First approach. We are excited to bring our targeted protein degradation platform together with Blueprint Medicines’ vast precision therapy expertise to energize the fight against these dynamic and debilitating diseases.”