Discussion

Advances in genomics and basic research are now providing a long list of clear causes that lie at the heart of a range of debilitating diseases. This has the potential to open the door to many new and improved targeted therapies. However, most of these novel disease targets, such as transcription factors, are currently considered undruggable by the pharmaceutical industry.

PhoreMost Limited is developing a novel phenotypic screening platform called ‘Site-Seeker’ that can systematically identify the best new targets for drug development, and crucially, how to drug them. At the core of ‘Site-Seeker’ is a proteomics approach dubbed ‘Protein-Interference’ that can unmask cryptic drug sites in the human genome and then directly link them to useful therapeutic functions in a live-cell context.

This talk will further describe the development of the ‘Site-Seeker’ and ‘Protein-interference’ technologies and provide early proof-of-concept data for its use in rationally de-orphanising undruggable disease targets.