BioCentury
ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

Go-ing sugar specific

How Go Therapeutics' glycopeptide epitopes can create cancer-specific mAbs

April 27, 2015 7:00 AM UTC

Go Therapeutics Inc. has developed a target discovery and screening platform that can generate mAbs against hybrid epitopes of cell surface proteins and aberrant O-linked glycosylation sites that are only found on tumors, resulting in cancer-specific therapies that could either be able to hit previously undruggable targets or improve efficacy and/or safety. The company hopes first to partner the platform with a few pharma companies and then develop an in-house pipeline.

According to co-founder and CSO Thayer White, the origins of Go Therapeutics started with his and fellow co-founder Henrik Clausen's work identifying and purifying glycosyltransferases, the enzymes that attach glycan structures to cells. Together they developed a library of glycosyltransferases, "but at first we weren't exactly sure how to use them," White told BioCentury. ...