Decoration and Dimerization of Chimeric Proteins Mediated by Coiled-Coil Interactions

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The pharmaceutical industry is one of the most profitable Canadian manufacturing sector and its strength relies on continuous innovation, with formulation at the core of its strategic development. While nano-medicine (e.g. drug-antibody conjugates and intricate assemblies of proteins) are the latest and most-promising generation of therapeutics, the industry still struggles to design and produce them efficiently.Forbius, a Canadian company focusing on the development of novel biotherapeutics to treat rare diseases, is the industrial partner of this Collaborative Research and Development Grant application. Through this project, a collaboration between researchers at Polytechnique Montréal, Université de Montréal and the R&D team at Forbius is proposed in order to design Forbius' next-generation therapeutics. At the heart of the proposed research is a versatile peptide-based conjugation platform intensively exploited by the team at Polytechnique Montreal, that will be applied to engineer 1) novel approaches for the conjugation of drugs to antibodies, 2) unnatural dimers of proteins to be tested as potential inhibitors, and 3) a portfolio of enabling technologies to favor the production and the purification of the peptides and proteins being produced in the context of the project.The project will involve 3 HQPs - two post-doctoral fellows and one PhD student - that will be trained in a multidisciplinary environment and exposed to the industrial challenges faced by small Canadian pharmaceutical companies. With 2 drugs in clinical trials phase, Forbius is now rapidly expanding its R&D activities and actively recruiting. Furthermore, within Canada only, more than twenty local small biotech companies are currently designing similar products. They all are, in addition to the Canadian branches of the multinational pharmaceutical companies, potential employers of the HQP trained during this project. Indeed, HQPs are currently in high demand in the biomanufacturing sector; this represents a significant outcome of the project to sustain the growth of these companies in Canada.