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, leading to abnormally low levels of the particular protein leading to 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 the levels of these proteins, allowing normal function to be restored. Vicinitas Therapeutics is focused on developing small-molecule drugs that stop the degradation of specific proteins to restore their levels for therapeutic benefit.
