BioCentury
ARTICLE | Product Development

Enabling patient PRPs

Mercator strikes two deals to optimize its peptide-receptor pairs in cancer

January 17, 2011 8:00 AM UTC

After securing exclusive rights to an in vivo, patient-based screening platform for cancer-specific peptide-receptor pairs, Mercator Therapeutics Inc. needed a source of optimized peptides and antibodies. A pair of deals this month gives the biotech access to antibodies for targeting the receptors, and peptides for delivering toxins to tumors.

Mercator was founded in 2010 to commercialize the work of Renata Pasqualini and Wadih Arap, two researchers from the University of Texas M.D. Anderson Cancer Center who have spent more than a decade developing patient-based screening methods to identify cancer-associated cellular receptors and peptides that home to those receptors, dubbed peptide-receptor pairs (PRPs)...