Public Funding for Ubiquigent Ltd

With a growing and ageing population, the burden of chronic diseases is the UK’s greatest societal challenge. Thus there is an urgent need for new medicines to address the increasing impact on the population of chronic neurodegenerative diseases, including Parkinson’s, Alzheimer’s, Huntington’s and Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis that lead to dementia, movement and other disorders. Around 850,000 people in the UK suffer from dementia alone, costing the healthcare system >£26bn per year. Very few treatments are currently available for people with neurodegenerative diseases, and those that do exist treat the symptoms or are effective at only certain disease stages. A drug target has been identified whose targeting has the potential for the treatment of such diseases. The objective of this project is to develop and characterise early chemical starting points that could form the basis of a programme towards the development of clinical drug candidates and ultimately potential treatments for a variety of both central and peripheral neurodegenerative diseases.

Despite advancements in the pharmaceutical industry there remains a significant need for new therapies to address unmet clinical needs. The ubiquitin system defines a cascade of proteins that control regulated protein turnover amongst other functions. Its key role in the regulation of probably the majority if not all cellular proteins and processes means that it presents a deep array of potential drug targets - currently largely untapped by the pharma industry - addressing multiple therapeutic areas including many currently proving challenging such as dementia, cancer and metabolic diseases. Ubiquigent is a world leading provider of biological assay services in this newly emerging ubiquitin system drug discovery space. The main rate limiting factor in ubiquitin system targeted drug discovery is the availability of small molecule chemistry that may provide the starting points for developing drugs against this family of targets. With the help of this grant Ubiquigent will develop first in class ubiquitin system (focussing on the deubiquitylase enzyme sub family) targeted small molecule libraries to unlock ubiquitin system drug discovery across the pharmaceutical industry to enable the development of critical future medicines.