RNA epigenetics – an emerging, innovative area of drug discovery
RNA epigenetics is an “untapped druggable space” that could be the next breakthrough/ frontier for innovative treatments for cancer and a broad array of other conditions.
What is more, is that it lends itself to small molecule drugs adding to the small molecule armamentarium of targeted drugs for cancer that are giving doctors and their patients new treatment options, including PARP inhibitors, kinase inhibitors and others.
STORM Therapeutics is the first company to come out of the nascent field. It became the first company in the world to demonstrate in vivo activity of an RNA methyltransferase inhibitor, showing proof of concept efficacy in animal models and is on course to enter the clinic in 2021.
The paper entitled ‘Role of RNA modifications in cancer’ is an authoritative and comprehensive review of the emerging and highly promising field of RNA epigenetics, highlighting pathways implicated in cancer to-date, describing their biological functions and their connections to the disease.
The Company recently published a scientific paper in the peer reviewed journal Nature Reviews Cancer. The paper, entitled ‘Role of RNA modifications in cancer’ is an authoritative and comprehensive review of the emerging and highly promising field of RNA epigenetics, highlighting pathways implicated in cancer to-date, describing their biological functions and their connections to the disease.
The scientific paper, written by Founder of STORM Therapeutics’ Professor Tony Kouzarides and Isaia Barbieri from The Gurdon Institute, The University of Cambridge describes insights into seven different internal RNA modifications, their mechanisms of actions (where known) and the evidence linking them to cancers. See link to the paper in the peer reviewed journal Nature Reviews Cancer: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41568-020-0253-2
Professor Tony Kouzarides, Founder of STORM Therapeutics and Deputy Director of Gurdon Institute, University of Cambridge, said: “This paper describes the importance of understanding key RNA epitranscriptomic pathways and their implications for a wide range of cancers. It highlights that an increasing number of RNA modifications and the enzymes responsible for their deposition, removal and detection (or writers, erasers and readers) play context-specific roles in a rapidly expanding catalogue of cancers. They are expected to be tractable for development of targeted small molecule therapies for a wide range of those cancers and could additionally enhance the efficacies of current cancer treatments by affecting primary and acquired drug resistance.” Read more at www.Nature.com
