Partnership to Develop Medicines for Protein Degradation

The University of Dundee and Boehringer Ingelheim are collaborating to develop a novel class of medicines that target disease-causing proteins for degradation, using the expertise of the University’s Dr Alessio Ciulli, one of the pioneers in the field of PROteolysis TArgeting Chimeric molecules (PROTACs).

PROTACs are designed to harness the cell’s natural disposal system (the ubiquitin-proteasome) to specifically remove disease-causing proteins. They do this by triggering the labelling of these as “expired” proteins, which the proteasome then removes.

“We believe our approach has the potential to fundamentally transform how we tackle protein targets to fight disease”, said Dr Ciulli, winner of the 2015 EFMC Prize for a young medicinal chemist in academia.

“We are very excited to partner with Boehringer Ingelheim, one of the world's 20 leading pharmaceutical companies. This is a prime example of an industry-academia collaboration to establish a disruptive new approach to drug discovery, initially developed in academia and to enable its translation all the way to benefit patients.”

The collaboration will also benefit from top facilities and expertise available within the School of Life Sciences at Dundee, including the MRC Protein Phosphorylation and Ubiquitylation Unit, headed by Professor Dario Alessi, and the FingerPrint Proteomics Facility, co-directed by Professors Mike Ferguson and Angus Lamond and managed by Dr Douglas Lamont.

“We are looking forward to working with Dr Alessio Ciulli, one of the world leaders in this exciting new research area,” said Clive R. Wood, Ph.D., Senior Corporate Vice President, Discovery Research at Boehringer Ingelheim. “Working closely with the researchers at the University of Dundee, one of the top research centres in the UK for life sciences, we aim to establish a unique platform that can generate PROTAC-based drug candidates for multiple areas of unmet medical need."