ThioS: Targeting sulfation
Kinases, which attach a phosphate group to proteins, emerged over the last decade as one of the hottest classes of biological targets due to the presence of an enzymatic site that is amenable to chemical modulation, as well as their activity in numerous biological pathways involved in disease. By contrast, other mechanisms of post-translational modification of proteins have not been studied in the same detail. ThioS Pharmaceuticals Inc. hopes to take advantage of that gap by mining new biological targets using its expertise in sulfation pathways.
The company has identified numerous enzymes involved in the addition and removal of sulfate groups from both intra- and extra-cellular glycoproteins and is developing therapeutics based on sulfation pathways involved in disease pathogenesis...