UbiQ secures 2.7 mioEUR EUROSTARS grant to tackle SUMOylation.

Amsterdam, The Netherlands, September 12th, 2017: UbiQ, a biotech company focused on the development and commercialization of research tools and small molecule drugs targeting the ubiquitin system, has been awarded a 2.7 mioEUR EUROSTARS grant for the pre-clinical development of a targeted therapy for Diffuse Large B-cell Lymphoma (DLBCL).

The EUROSTARS grant (with the acronym; SUBLYME*) will enable UbiQ to advance its mechanism-based covalent SUMOylation inhibitor through pre-clinical development. The work will be performed by UbiQ and French, German and Swedish life-science companies as European Consortium Partners in SUBLYME. The Technische Universität München (TUM) is participating as the leading academic partner; Prof Ulrich Keller, deputy head of the Department of Haematology/Oncology, is a key opinion leader in the molecular treatment of lymphoma malignancies. TUM will be involved in validation and mechanistic studies of the novel DLBCL treatment strategy in both primary human material and unique cell lines and mouse models developed in the SUBLYME project. “Our work has validated the enzymes responsible for protein SUMOylation as promising targets for the treatment of cancers such as B cell lymphomas. We are excited that, with this grant, we can make a start to bring UbiQ’s SUMOylation inhibitors to the clinic.”

“SUBLYME scored very high in the EUROSTARS ranking system that takes into account the level of innovation, market need and potential. The project scored as number 31 of 376 EUROSTARS applications at the European level”, says Boris Rodenko, VP Translational Drug Discovery of UbiQ.

About UbiQ
UbiQ is a spin-out of the Netherlands Cancer Institute and based at the Amsterdam Science Park in the Netherlands. UbiQ has generated some of the first commercially available custom ubiquitinated peptides and now distributes a whole range of ubiquitin-related reagents worldwide. In addition to enabling drug discovery in the rapidly expanding ubiquitin research field, UbiQ is also actively developing small molecule inhibitors that target the ubiquitin system. UbiQ’s Triple E technology exploits a reactive group that specifically traps the E1, E2 and E3 ubiquitinating enzymes. By adding this ‘hook’ onto ubiquitin itself or onto a peptide or small molecule, it has now, for the first time, become possible to specifically monitor and block the activity of dozens of enzymes involved in protein ubiquitination. This technology was published in Nature Chemical Biology in May 2016. More information can be found on the company website www.ubiqbio.com.

In January 2017, UbiQ, together with Mercachem (www.mercachem.com), has established a new company called SumiQ Therapeutics (www.sumiqtx.com) to develop a targeted therapy for Myc-driven cancers, an unrivaled challenge in oncology research. Functional genomics screens have revealed that the activation of oncogenes Myc, NOTCH1 or mutant KRAS generates a cancer-specific dependency on SUMOylation. SumiQ aims to exploit this cancer vulnerability by targeting protein SUMOylation.