PEPTOMYC
Peptomyc SL is a company focused on the
development of a new generation of cell
penetrating peptides (CPPs) for cancer
treatment. The company was founded in
December 2014 and it is based on Dr. Soucek’s
scientific work focused on Myc inhibition.
Background and market opportunity
Chemotherapy is currently the most common
non-surgical therapeutic option for the majority
of cancers. Unfortunately, it often results in poor
overall outcome for the patients due to the
development of resistance to these nonselective
treatments. Currently the alternative to
such therapies is so-called “personalized
medicine”, but very few targeted therapies have
been commercialized to date and these target a
restricted subset of cancers. In addition, the
majority of these therapies target degenerate
and redundant functions in tumor cells, resulting
once again in resistance to treatment. Myc is an
oncogene causally implicated in most cancers
and is often associated with aggressive, poorly
differentiated and angiogenic tumors. Myc has a
non-redundant function in cancer around which
tumors cannot evolve, hence targeting Myc is the
most promising therapeutic opportunity we
have to date. However, a Myc inhibitor has yet to
become clinically available.
Technology
Dr. Laura Soucek has generated Omomyc, a
dominant-negative Myc mutant that is able to
prevent Myc-dependent gene transactivation
functions both in vitro and in vivo, negating
Myc’s ability to bind its DNA recognition binding
site. Omomyc has proven to be the most
efficacious direct Myc inhibitor to date and
appears to be therapeutically valuable in a
variety, if not all, cancer types, but so far it has
only been considered a proof of principle, whose
application could be limited to gene therapy.
However, our new results indicate that the
Omomyc peptide itself displays excellent cell
penetrating properties and can efficiently enter
cells and exert a strong anti-Myc activity that
results in arrest/death of all cancer cell lines
tested so far. Peptomyc SL now aims to further
develop the Omomyc peptide - and improved
variants - into clinically viable therapeutics for
the treatment of cancer patients.
