The global biopharmaceutical company Almirall, a CataloniaBio & HealthTech member, focused on skin health, and the Institute for Research in Biomedicine (IRB Barcelona), announced today a research collaboration to identify new oral treatments for immune-inflammatory skin diseases with remaining high unmet medical needs using molecular glue degraders, a novel therapeutic modality. These monovalent degraders offer a new avenue to induce the degradation of potentially disease-causing proteins that cannot be targeted with conventional therapeutic agents.
The collaboration brings together Almirall’s scientific, dermatological, and data analysis knowledge with the expertise of the IRB Barcelona’s Targeted Protein Degradation and Drug Discovery lab, led by Dr. Cristina Mayor-Ruiz. Almirall scientists have identified several proteins whose abnormal function is associated with inflammatory immune skin diseases. However, many of these potentially therapeutically relevant proteins are not amenable to conventional small-molecule inhibitors, as they lack defined ligand-binding pockets.
“This exciting collaboration underlines Almirall’s R&D commitment to provide innovative treatment options to patients suffering from severe skin diseases. It also builds on complementary core expertise of each partner to facilitate research and drug development.”, states Dr. Thomas Huber, Head of Research at Almirall.
Over the past year, Almirall has established strategic collaborations to accelerate the discovery and development of new therapies in Medical Dermatology. Examples of these agreements are the partnership with BIOMAP, the first dermatology project of the European Innovative Medicines Initiative (IMI), to advance the field of psoriasis and atopic dermatitis, and the collaboration with the University of Dundee, which will bring with it the opportunity to develop new therapies based on Proteolysis Targeted Chimeras, another type of targeted protein degraders.
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