10 August 2012

Eric Marsault, affiliated professor atUniversité de Sherbrooke, will work with Encycle Therapeutics to develop a new technology that promises to improve the effectiveness of initial stages of drug discovery.

At the base of this technology: an innovative platform for the cyclization of peptides, discovered by Professor Andrei Yudin, of the University of Toronto.

Peptides are considered good potential therapeutic agents, but are unstable. The new Encycle chemistry platform, a subsidiary of MaRS Innovation, stabilizes the peptide cyclizing. This process improves medical properties of the resulting molecules.

Sherbrooke and Ontario’s research teams aim to demonstrate that the chemistry platform works on a wide variety of peptides and that the molecules have the ability to reach therapeutic targets of interest.

Ultimately, this approach could reduce costs and time associated with drug development.

“This collaboration aims to unlock the potential of this class of molecules and to provide new classes of therapeutic candidates able to mimic the structural features of proteins”, explains Eric Marsault, professor of Medicinal Chemistry at the Institut de pharmacologie de Sherbrooke.

The project has already drawn the attention of four pharmaceutical companies.

The Quebec-Ontario Corridor comes to life

This interprovincial project is one of the two pilot projects initiated under the Life Sciences Quebec-Ontario Corridor.

Source: Université de Sherbrooke (french)