Biotechnology Awards 2022

30 GHP / Biotechnology Awards 2022 Jan22531 Over the past decade, a growing body of scientific evidence has demonstrated the critical role of senescent cells in driving ageing and age-related diseases. In particular, Rubedo Life Sciences and others have reported that targeted apoptosis of senescent cells restores tissue function in response to chemotoxicity and ageing in animal models. Rubedo Life Sciences is developing a novel small molecule approach to selectively target and clear senescent cells from aged or pathological tissues, supporting tissue regeneration and restoring organ function. This approach will result in novel pharmacological treatments that are selective for senescent cells and designed to improve tolerability in older, frail and sick individuals. These pro-inflammatory and pro-fibrotic senescent cells accumulate in the body with age and disease, causing increased chronic inflammation, pain, and tissue decay that contribute to age-related diseases such as pulmonary diseases, diabetes, Alzheimer’s, cardio-vascular diseases, and cancer. Any cells in the human body can become senescent over time. While in this irreversible senescence state, cells remain metabolically active but stop replicating and growing. Senescent cells release cytokines and other toxins into the bloodstream, driving chronic inflammation, which plays a key role in chronic disease progression such as fibrosis or increasing cancer metastasis and tumour growth. The small molecules developed from Rubedo’s discovery platform ALEMBIC™ are engineered to be selectively activated in target cells that emerge with age-related diseases driving the chronic degenerative pathology. The platform has developed a novel pipeline of therapeutic candidates which selectively target senescent, pro-inflammatory, and pro-fibrotic cell populations that result from a variety of cellular stress and damage. Rubedo recently released in pre-print, currently under peer-review, a proof of concept paper where it presents initial results on a tool compound that is based on a prodrug strategy. This approach takes advantage of a known enzymatic activity marker of senescent cells. The organisation’s data demonstrates this strategy of converting a pancytotoxic drug into a selective and well-tolerated senolytic prodrug capable of ameliorating age-related diseases such as frailty and the loss of cognitive and muscle function, in geriatric preclinical models (Doan et al., 2020). Rubedo lead compounds use different targets, mechanism of actions and markers, identified by ALEMBIC™ to be superior in selectivity and efficacy. Company: Rubedo Life Sciences Contact: Marco Quarta Email: [email protected] Website: www.rubedolife.com Leading Innovators in Senescent Cell Targeting Therapies 2022

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