idw – Informationsdienst Wissenschaft
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
Nachrichten, Termine, Experten
The PROXIDRUGS Cluster4Future will receive up to €15 million from the Federal Ministry of Education and Research (BMBF) for the second phase of research into one of the most promising drug classes in biomedical research. Coordinated by Goethe University Frankfurt, 21 partners from science, biotechnology and the pharmaceutical industry have joined forces to this end. They are researching and developing active substances that systematically degrade disease-relevant proteins in the body. PROXIDRUGS is one of 14 projects within the German government's Clusters4Future Initiative, which promotes the transfer of research into application.
FRANKFURT. Malfunctioning proteins cause or promote many diseases, including cancer, various neurodegenerative disorders, inflammatory diseases and infections. However, it is estimated that only 20 percent of these proteins can be blocked by conventional small molecule drugs. The remaining 80 percent of disease-relevant proteins are not yet therapeutically accessible.
Since 2021, scientists from the PROXIDRUGS Cluster4Future have been driving forward the development of a new class of drugs that uses the cell's own protein recycling system to specifically degrade disease-relevant proteins. Having been successfully evaluated by an independent jury, PROXIDRUGS will receive up to €15 million in federal government funding for a further three years.
PROXIDRUGS spokesperson Prof. Ivan Đikić from Goethe University Frankfurt’s Institute of Biochemistry II explains: “The PROXIDRUGS team has made great technological progress over the past three years and established new platforms for the identification of building blocks for active substances, which will now be systematically developed further. In line with that, we have strategically expanded the PROXIDRUGS network to include partners from application-oriented research, including from the biotech and pharmaceutical industries, who contribute their specific expertise to the transfer from research to medical application.”
Goethe University President Prof. Enrico Schleiff says: “The PROXIDRUGS future cluster is an excellent example of how Goethe University’s networking in the Rhine-Main region is developing into an innovation network that radiates far beyond the region. In 2015, Goethe University, Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and Technical University of Darmstadt founded a unique university network in Germany, the Rhine-Main Universities, RMU. PROXIDRUGS is now demonstrating its potential as a ‘transfer accelerator’ that will establish itself sustainably in the Rhine-Main region.”
The Federal Ministry of Education and Research’s Clusters4Future competition was launched in summer 2019 as part of the High-Tech Strategy 2025. The aim is to foster knowledge and technology transfer in top-class regional networks. Sixteen finalists were initially selected from the 137 draft projects submitted, who were able to further develop their drafts into more detailed concepts from May 2020 onwards. PROXIDRUGS has been funded for an initial three-year implementation phase since 2021 and will now enter the second of a total of three possible implementation phases.
Professor Ivan Ðikić
Institute of Biochemistry II
and Buchmann Institute for Molecular Life Sciences
Goethe University Frankfurt
Tel: +49 (0) 69 6301-5964
dikic@biochem2.uni-frankfurt.de
https://www.proxidrugs.de/ Proxidrugs website
https://aktuelles.uni-frankfurt.de/english/new-active-substances-for-future-drug... Start of the first PROXIDRUGS implementation phase (2021)
Symbolic representation of the PROXIDRUGS’ function: The active substance brings 2 proteins together ...
Irina Bezsonova
Goethe University Frankfurt
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Symbolic representation of the PROXIDRUGS’ function: The active substance brings 2 proteins together ...
Irina Bezsonova
Goethe University Frankfurt
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