Kinaxo gets $914K grant for proteomics development

Germany's Kinaxo Biotechnologies GmbH has been awarded a 575,000-euro ($914,075) grant by the Bavarian Ministry of Economic Affairs, Infrastructure, Transport and Technology to help expand the applications for its chemical proteomics platform, which enables the assessment of native cellular proteome interactions and selectivity of small-molecule drug candidates.

Kinaxo will use the funding to demonstrate how its platform can be employed to identify the native protein targets of compounds found in cell-based drug discovery screens. Over the past decade, many biopharmaceutical companies have built their drug R&D programs around a high-throughput screening approach, testing large libraries of chemical entities over a few validated protein targets. In oncology programs, the ability of human cancers to mutate and overcome single-target inhibition strategies means many drug development companies are taking a phenotypic approach by first screening compounds for a particular desired cellular response prior to honing in on the specific target.

Kinaxo says its Cellular Target Profiling technology will help support phenotypic-based drug discovery, not only through the identification of the compound target, but also by defining the affinities of these interactions.