Ann: Grant for Cancer Drug Research, page-17

I feel like I'm finally getting a handle on the significance of the Sox18 collaboration. Firstly, however, its good to be reminded that the collaboration with Janssen was all about ADCs and killer cancer payloads.

The announcement of 2 September talks about safer drugs with fewer side effects; it talks about protein-protein interactions and most importantly it identifies Sox18 as an intracellular master switch. The IMB are not looking to kill cancer cells using toxins, but rather to turn off the intracellular master switch using phylomers to disrupt 'specific interactions between Sox18 and its binding partners'. Altogether safer and with fewer side effects.

I would suggest that they have wanted to go down this road since at least December 2005 refer paper titled Effect of Disrupted Sox18 Transcription Factor Function on Tumor Growth, Vascularization, and Endothelial Development published in the JNCI. They have had to wait because no-one could target intracellular PPI.

"We have now entered a new technology era that enables us to validate a novel type of molecular target that was previously considered beyond reach of any drug discovery pipeline," said Dr Francois.

Hence, the title of the project Targeting the Undruggable.

Would the idea attract the attention of Big Pharma? I don't know except that Janssen are interested in the outcome of Phylogica's emerging oncology program.