Kymera Therapeutics LLC, a biotechnology company pioneering targeted protein degradation as a transformative new approach to creating breakthrough medicines for patients, announced it has entered into a two-year discovery collaboration agreement with GSK, a science-led global healthcare company that is leveraging innovations in small molecule-based targeted protein degradation and encoded library technologies.

“Targeted protein degradation is a ground-breaking new therapeutic modality that has the potential to provide important treatment options for patients,” said Laurent Audoly, Ph.D., president and CEO, Kymera Therapeutics. “Kymera is leveraging its proprietary Pegasus drug discovery platform in collaboration with GSK to advance targeted protein degradation-based drug discovery.”

Under the terms of the agreement, GSK and Kymera will work together on a limited number of protein degradation targets of mutual interest to discover novel drug candidates. The companies also agree to collaborate to discover novel E3 ligases – the enzymes that bind and target disease-causing proteins marking them for degradation. The agreement supports ongoing collaboration between company scientists, with each company also having a right to use certain insights gained in the collaboration for its own programs.

“E3 ligase discovery is part of Kymera’s larger strategy to expand the current E3 ligase toolbox, advance the chemistry and the biology of E3 ligases and provide a next-generation solution to developing protein degrading therapeutics,” said Nello Mainolfi, Ph.D., co-founder and chief technology officer, Kymera Therapeutics.

Targeted protein degradation redirects the body’s innate protein degradation and recycling machinery, the ubiquitin proteasome system, to degrade disease-causing proteins not fully addressed by other modalities.

Kymera’s Pegasus platform was designed to improve upon current approaches to targeted protein degradation and accelerate drug discovery and development with an unmatched ability to identify, target and degrade dysregulated proteins. The Pegasus platform consists of informatics-driven target identification, novel E3 ligases and ligands, proprietary ternary complex predictive modeling capabilities and degradation tools, including novel linkers and protein-binding ligands, as well as whole-cell proteomics capabilities.

Using a small molecule-mediated knockdown strategy, Kymera rationally designs and develops heterobifunctional molecules that recruit disease-causing proteins to E3 ubiquitin ligases, resulting in the target protein’s ubiquitination and degradation, and the ultimate resolution of cellular dysregulation.