Presented by:

Christina Woo, PhD

Professor of Chemistry and Chemical Biology

Harvard's Office of Technology Development and LabCentral invite you to the latest event in the Guppy Tank series, where Harvard life-science innovators will pitch their early-stage concepts to a panel of entrepreneurs and investors for constructive, in-depth feedback.

Please join us on Tuesday, April 29 from 4:00 to 6:00 p.m. at LabCentral to hear the presentation, learn from experts on startup formation, and participate in giving audience feedback. The event is accompanied by a reception with food and drinks. All are welcome!

Dr. Woo welcomes constructive feedback from the Guppy Tank panelists, and from the audience, on the commercialization strategy for this innovation.

Register Here

The Panel:

Cassidy Blundell, PhD - Partner, Mission BioCapital

L. Miguel Camargo, PhD - Senior Commercialization Advisor, NobleReach Emerge

More panelists to be announced soon!

About The Project:

Targeted protein degradation (TPD) is a rapidly advancing therapeutic space attracting a lot of interest as it presents a new and promising strategy to remove disease-relevant proteins that are difficult to target with conventional drugs. Currently, there are multiple ongoing late-stage clinical trials investigating TPD therapies for cancer, autoimmune disorders, and neurological disorders. However, despite the large clinical and pre-clinical TPD pipeline, there remain concerns with off-target effects from traditional TPD ligands as well as the limited synthetic scope of these molecules.

Professor Christina Woo’s lab has recently discovered a novel class of ligands to cereblon, an E3 ligase substrate adapter that is readily hijacked to clear disease-relevant protein targets, called “cyclimids”. Cyclimids exhibit distinct and diverse modes of binding to cereblon, have reduced off-target effects compared to traditional TPD molecular glues, and can recruit protein substrates for targeted degradation. Leveraging the inherent tunability of cyclimids to recruit challenging targets, the Woo lab have developed a proprietary 2500-member library of molecular glues, which have been screened to identify novel therapeutic candidates. The team has also shown, with an initial panel of 60 bifunctional degraders, that their novel class of cyclimids can sensitively tune the removal of target proteins with minimal off-target effects and possess suitable metabolic stability and in vitro permeability.

The Woo lab is focused on the expansion and enhancement of cyclimids for therapeutic development through a startup, Cyclimid Therapeutics. Cyclimid Therapeutics will be developing a platform of novel TPD warheads by leveraging the synthetic scope and proprietary chemistry of their cyclimid library to generate and screen thousands of analogs against a series of challenging targets and “undruggable” proteins. In addition to studying and expanding their cyclimid library, the team is also working on identifying a pipeline of targets that have been validated for therapeutic potential but for which no FDA-approved therapeutic currently exists.

In summary, cyclimids are a novel class of ligands for cereblon and are novel and promising candidates for TPD. Given the Woo lab’s proprietary library, extensive synthetic capabilities, and the chemical tunability of cyclimids, Cyclimid Therapeutics presents an exciting and differentiated platform in the field of targeted protein degradation.