BioCentury
ARTICLE | Cover Story

Germinating MALT1

February 6, 2014 8:00 AM UTC

AstraZeneca plc has teamed up with the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology and the Centre for Drug Design and Discovery to make the first disclosed industry play for inhibitors of MALT1. The deal announcement caps five years of progress toward validating MALT1 in B cell lymphoma and autoimmune diseases.

MALT1 (mucosa associated lymphoid tissue lymphoma translocation gene 1) was first identified as a driver of a small subset of B cell lymphomas more than a decade ago. The protein was quickly implicated by Roche's Genentech Inc.unitand other groupsas a regulator of B and T cell signaling and NF-kB activity,1 but its precise molecular function and the potential druggability of the target remained unclear...