Credit: Jen Randall/Matchpoint Therapeutics
Although covalent drugs have been used for more than a century, the emergence of new tools has helped spur recent advances in the field. Indeed, covalent medicine experienced a resurgence roughly 15 years ago.
Now, a new company—Matchpoint Therapeutics—is hoping to leverage the power of covalency for the discovery of precision small molecule medicines. The company launched today with $100 million in financing.
“We created Matchpoint to harness the powerful properties of covalency and enable the targeting of disease-causing proteins otherwise unamenable to small molecule intervention,” said Andre Turenne, president and CEO of Matchpoint. “We believe the immunology space is greatly underserved by current small molecule therapies and are excited by the potential of our proprietary platform to deliver highly specific covalent medicines for several of its most important and difficult targets.”
The durable target engagement achieved with covalent chemistry imparts improved potency, greater selectivity, and lower systemic exposure than otherwise possible. Matchpoint is pursuing genetically or clinically validated targets for which covalent chemistry is the only or best modality for therapeutic intervention.
Matchpoint’s Advanced Covalent Exploration (ACE) platform brings together tools (chemoproteomics that identifies novel covalent binders to disease-causing proteins, AI, and libraries of covalent compounds) to develop covalent medicines.
The Series A financing is led by Sanofi Ventures with participation from Atlas Venture, Access Biotechnology, Vertex Ventures HC, Digitalis Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments, and others.
“Our platform maximizes the potential for detecting novel covalent labelers of active sites, allosteric sites, and cryptic sites on targets that have historically proved elusive to drugs. It also enables a thorough assessment of a molecule’s selectivity profile early in the discovery process,” said Nathanael Gray, PhD, Matchpoint co-founder and professor of chemical and systems biology at Stanford University. “The range of applications of this platform is very exciting given that it is as well suited for the discovery of covalent inhibitors as it is for covalent degraders and covalent molecular glues.”
