German firm will provide chemical proteomics and phosphoproteomics platforms.

Kinaxo Biotechnologies and Daiichi Sankyo have agreed on a long-term cancer research collaboration that will focus on the use of Kinaxo’s technology platform to support development of the Japanese firm’s targeted anticancer drugs. Under the terms of the deal, Kinaxo will apply its chemical proteomics platforms, Cellular Target Profiling® and KinAffinity®, and its PhosphoScout® phosphoproteomics technology to Daiichi’s research programs.

The Cellular Target Profiling service is designed to provide new insights into small molecule target interactions and binding affinities across the proteome of any given cell line or tissue sample. Kinaxo claims the technology generates data to support decision making at various stages of drug development in areas including lead compound selection, target deconvolution, drug reprofiling, and the assessment of off-target toxicity. The platform combines chemical proteomics methods with quantitative mass spectrometry techniques to enable the identification of protein targets that interact with small molecules within cell lines or tissue proteomes, the ranking of cellular compound/target binding affinities across a broad dynamic range, the profiling of small molecules against native cellular derived proteins, and the correlation of preclinical and clinical data with the compound’s native target spectrum.

The KinAffinity service has been developed to profile kinase inhibitor targets across the native kinome of any given cell line or tissue. Kinaxo says the platform can simultaneously determine an inhibitor’s affinity to more than 340 endogenously expressed kinases expressed in a cell line or tissue. Benefits include the ability to profile a compound against endogenously expressed, full-length proteins in the presence of cellular co-factors and native complex partners, which the firm suggests represents a major advantage over traditional biochemical panel screening using recombinantly expressed proteins or only protein domains.

PhosphoScout is a quantitative phosphoproteomics service developed to investigate cellular signal transduction pathways and their response to drug treatment. Designed to allow the annotation and quantification of regulated phosphorylation sites in living cells, animal models and patient samples, the technology does not require phosphospecific antibodies, Kinaxo claims, and delivers global analysis of the phosphoproteome by measuring the relative quantity of more than 15,000 phosphorylation sites in a single experiment. Potential applications include system-wide modeling of signaling events to investigate drug influence on cellular phosphorylation patterns, investigating cross-talk, identifying potential mechanisms of cellular resistance, and the discovery of potential drug-response biomarkers.

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