Two years ago almost to the day, I toured Arvinas’ New Haven headquarters. We learned about PROTAC, a technology invented at Yale by Professor Craig Crews, which works by hijacking the cell’s own disposal system to tag and destroy disease-causing proteins instead of just trying to block them.
In the neurology unit, we saw cultured neurons and stem cells, and heard about Arvinas’ work on a PROTAC designed to cross the blood-brain barrier, aimed at diseases like Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, and Huntington’s. At the time, it was still early-stage science.
It thrilled me then, back when I was 16 in high school, and it still thrills me today.
Two years later, here’s what’s happened since:
Vepdegestrant, the PROTAC Arvinas developed with Pfizer, just became the first-ever FDA-approved PROTAC therapy in history - now treating patients with metastatic breast cancer.
The brain-penetrant PROTAC I heard about on that tour is no longer theoretical. ARV-102, designed to cross the blood-brain barrier and target Parkinson’s, just showed over 50% degradation of its target protein in the cerebrospinal fluid of actual Parkinson’s patients after just 28 days of treatment.
Arvinas is now planning a trial of that same molecule in progressive supranuclear palsy, another neurodegenerative disease with almost no treatment options.
Craig Crews was just awarded the Yale Founders Award at this year’s Yale Innovation Summit for the entire body of work.
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