Cancer Diagnosis Company 'D&P Biotech' Advances Commercialization of Dream Drug 'PROTAC' Assay

Development Agreement with Professor Baek Kwanghyun of CHA University Industry-Academic Cooperation Foundation

[Asia Economy Yeongnam Reporting Headquarters, Reporter Dongwook Park] D&P Biotech Co., Ltd. (CEO Myunghoon Lee), which focuses on the discovery and commercialization of 'biomarkers'?biological indicators that diagnose the progression of diseases?is expanding its research scope with a next-generation new drug discovery platform.

On the 12th, according to D&P Biotech's Daegu branch, the company signed a development agreement with Professor Kwanghyun Baek of CHA University Industry-Academic Cooperation Foundation to commercialize 'UBIQAS' (UBIQuitination Assay System), a PROTAC (PROteolysis-TArgeting Chimera) screening platform for protein degradation systems.

UBIQAS is an analytical method that can verify the intracellular ubiquitination status and degradation level, providing direct information on the ubiquitination sites of target proteins, thereby enabling more precise validation of PROTAC drug candidates' functions. Ubiquitin is a protein composed of 76 amino acids.

Recently, the direction of new drug development has shifted from 'inhibiting' protein functions to 'removing' them, and the protein degradation system using PROTAC is at the center of this trend.

PROTAC is a synthetic compound that induces degradation by bringing the body's protein degradation system and the target protein into close proximity. It has many advantages over conventional synthetic therapeutics and is expected to be a platform for innovative new drug development. Notably, only 13% of human proteins have been targeted for drug development due to technological limitations in existing synthetic therapeutics, but PROTAC can develop therapeutics for any target, significantly broadening the scope of new drug development.

Due to the innovation of 'new drugs utilizing protein degradation systems,' global market attention is very high. Abivnas is a representative U.S. company in PROTAC drug development and was the first PROTAC-related company to be listed on NASDAQ in September 2018. Since then, as of May this year, its market capitalization has rapidly grown to about 2 trillion KRW.

'PROTAC,' fundamentally removing problematic proteins in the body

Medical community's focus on innovative new drug development platform

Global pharmaceutical companies are also investing heavily in related technology development. This year, Merck formed a partnership with Almac Discovery, which has a DeUBiquitinating enzyme (DUB) platform, and Pfizer invested in Mission Therapeutics, a company specializing in deubiquitinating enzymes, reflecting big pharma's high expectations for protein degradation drugs.

However, the reason why PROTAC-related new drug development research has not progressed as quickly or diversely as expected is due to the limitations of existing analytical methods that can verify PROTAC functions. PROTAC activity is confirmed at the protein level of the final active product, with immunoblotting and mass spectrometry being the most commonly used methods.

However, these methods cannot be applied to large-scale screening and do not provide the information needed to optimize PROTAC structures. Ultimately, PROTAC design and optimization rely heavily on experience, requiring significant time and effort in the challenging cycle of 'PROTAC design-synthesis-testing-analysis.' UBIQAS is expected to contribute to accelerating related research and new drug development by providing precise information on PROTAC functions that existing analytical methods cannot verify.

Meanwhile, Professor Kwanghyun Baek of CHA University has conducted research on protein degradation regulation for the past 25 years and is recognized as a leading medical scientist in deubiquitinating enzyme research worldwide. Since 2019, he has been invited as the guest editor for two consecutive years for a special issue on protein degradation regulatory enzymes in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences (IF=4.556), demonstrating his academic recognition.

Partnering with Professor Baek, D&P Biotech is a promising venture company that developed genomic technology to predict lung cancer prognosis and subsequently enhanced diagnostic performance by integrating it with CT imaging through AI (artificial intelligence) technology. The lung cancer prognosis genomic technology is scheduled to undergo confirmatory clinical trials with the Ministry of Food and Drug Safety within this year, and the AI technology is also expected to enter the approval process sequentially.