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BOSTON--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Monte Rosa Therapeutics, a biotechnology company focused on developing precision medicines to degrade disease-causing proteins, today announced the formation of its scientific advisory board (SAB). The SAB comprises a distinguished group of academic and industry experts who will advise the Monte Rosa team on the development of the company’s molecular glue platform and its potential to degrade undruggable proteins that cause or drive the progression of genomically-defined diseases intractable to standard care.

“We are proud to have preeminent leaders in protein degradation, computational cancer genomics, drug discovery and clinical development joining our SAB,” said Markus Warmuth, M.D., CEO of Monte Rosa. “We look forward to meeting regularly and fully leveraging this world-renowned team’s diverse breadth of experiences as we build our pipeline of molecular glue degraders. With our scientific advisors’ guidance, we are confident that we will be leaders in molecular glues and deliver these novel therapies to patients quickly.”

Appointed members of Monte Rosa’s newly formed SAB include the following:

• Nicolas Thomä, Ph.D., group leader at the Friedrich Miescher Institute for Biomedical Research in Basel, Switzerland. Dr. Thomä’s lab focuses on protein complexes at the interface between DNA repair, transcription and chromatin. A particular focus is on ubiquitin E3 ligases, their role in protein degradation and ways in which these enzymes can be reprogrammed by small molecules. Dr. Thomä chairs the SAB.

• Michael Rape, Ph.D., professor of cell and developmental biology at University of California, Berkeley and investigator at the Howard Hughes Medical Institute. Dr. Rape’s laboratory is focused on implementing a combination of biochemistry, cell biology and high-throughput genetic screening to identify enzymes required for protein degradation. His team studies enzymes that control cell division and differentiation, two processes often misregulated in cancer.

• Ian Collins, Ph.D., co-founder of Monte Rosa and professor of medicinal chemistry at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, and head of chemistry in its Cancer Research UK Cancer Therapeutics Unit. Professor Collin’s research focuses on the discovery of small molecules to create new therapies to treat cancer. In particular, Professor Collins has a strong interest in using protein structures to understand how drugs bind to their target proteins and how to improve their properties.

• Eliezer Van Allen, M.D., associate professor at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and Harvard Medical School and associate member at the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard. Dr. Van Allen’s areas of focus are computational cancer genomics, the application of new technologies such as single-cell sequencing to personalized cancer medicine, and discovering response and resistance mechanisms to cancer therapies through patient-centered molecular profiling.

• Kimberly Blackwell, M.D., chief medical officer at Tempus Labs. Dr. Blackwell, a pioneer in breast cancer research, has played several different roles in bringing new therapies to patients facing cancer, including as a principal investigator for clinical trials which led to the approval of two revolutionary cancer agents, lapatinib (Tykerb^®) and ado-trastuzumab emtansine (T-DM1; Kadcyla^®). Prior to joining Tempus, she was vice president of early-phase oncology and immuno-oncology at Eli Lilly. Dr. Blackwell is also a member of Monte Rosa’s board of directors.

• David Schenkein, M.D., general partner at GV. Dr. Schenkein co-leads the life science investment team. Previously, Dr. Schenkein spent 10 years as chief executive officer and a member of the board of directors at Agios Pharmaceuticals, where he is currently the chairman. Dr. Schenkein has been a hematologist and medical oncologist for more than 30 years and serves as an adjunct attending physician in hematology at Tufts Medical Center.

About Monte Rosa

Monte Rosa Therapeutics is a biotechnology company developing molecular glues to degrade disease-causing proteins. The company has created a platform to rationally design small molecules that reprogram ubiquitin ligases to eliminate disease drivers previously deemed undruggable. The company’s drug discovery platform combines diverse and proprietary chemical libraries of small molecule protein degraders with in-house proteomics, structural biology, machine learning-based target selection and computational chemistry capabilities to predict and obtain protein degradation profiles. Monte Rosa was launched from founding investor Versant Ventures’ Ridgeline Discovery Engine and is headquartered in Boston, Mass., with research operations in both Boston and Basel, Switzerland. For more information, visit www.monterosatx.com.

Contacts

Dan Budwick, 1AB
dan@1abmedia.com