Accent Therapeutics, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, closed on a $40 million Series A financing. Accent will focus on the fairly new area of epitranscriptomics.
Accent Therapeutics, headquartered in Cambridge, Massachusetts, closed on a $40 million Series A financing. The round was funded by The Column Group, Atlas Venture and EcoR1 Capital.
Accent will focus on the fairly new area of epitranscriptomics—how RNA structure, stability, function and translation is involved in various diseases. In short, investigating how genes are turned on and off and how their activity is regulated.
RNA, especially messenger RNA (mRNA) function as go-betweens for DNA and the cells’ protein-manufacturing processes. Xconomy writes, “But before the cell makes proteins from RNA, it harnesses a variety of enzymes to attach or remove chemical groups from the RNA. These chemical modifications don’t affect the sequence of the RNA molecule, but they do change the RNA’s molecular structure, stability and function. This can ultimately affect how much protein is made from a particular mRNA. This gives the cell another control knob to turn when it wants to fine-tune the activity of a gene.”
Researchers with Accent recently published an overview of their work in Nature Reviews Drug Discovery with the title, “RNA-Modifying Proteins as Anticancer Drug Targets.” RNA-Modifying Proteins are referred to as RMPs.
The company’s founders include Howard Chang, Standford University; Chuan He, the University of Chicago; and Robert Copeland, president and chief scientific officer of Accent. Copeland said in a statement, “Epitranscriptomics opens a rich new target space, including RMPs that are associated with specific cancers, many with poor patient prognoses. We plan to treat patients by precisely targeting cancers that are uniquely dependent on these specific RMPs.”
Maps of the human epitranscriptome, which show the spots on mRNA molecules where there have been chemical modifications, only first began to be published in 2012. What these changes do, specifically, are still being determined, and are thought to be potential targets for disease modifying therapeutics. Some have already been impliciated in cancer.
The science is very new, which will leave Accent Therapeutics with plenty of basic research to do as it works to develop possible therapeutics. In addition to determining specific mRNA sites and what they do, it will work to identify and develop small molecule drugs that inhibit RNA-modifying enzymes and proteins associated with cancer.
“I like working on the cutting edge of new biology,” Copeland told Xconomy.
The company will use a variety of laboratory techniques, including a CRISPR-based system that, writes Xconomy, “allows them to systematically knock out genes involved in RNA modification one by one, in a wide range of cancer cell types.”
So far Accent has identified approximately 20 targets and has prioritized four. It hopes to identify more.
Copeland launched Epizyme in 2008 as its first chief scientific officer. He was there for nine years, launched an initial public offering, and pushed three drugs into the clinic. Epizyme is also an epigenetics company, focused on drugs that inhibit enzymes that alter DNA. The difference between epigenetics and epitranscriptomic drugs is that epitranscriptomic drug target RNA modifications instead of DNA modifications. The thinking on the part of Copeland and Accent is that the focus on RNA will be more precise.
