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Axial partners with great inventors creating unique business models. Profiling exciting life sciences companies at the earliest stages is important. Rather than talk about their work specifically conveying the opportunity set is more important where the company and others in the field will bring to market currently confidential inventions to more people.
Undruggable genome
Pursuing 10%-20% of the accessible targets has had a tremendous impact on human health. Antibodies have become commoditized after 2–3 decades of development and are good tools to get to extracellular targets. Small molecules have been very useful but are limited in the intracellular targets that are available to them. As a result, many new modalities (i.e. stapled peptides, PROTACs, molecular glues) are being developed to successfully pursue the other 80% of targets, which are mainly intracellular. These new modalities are often reliant on endocytosis and vesicle trafficking. New companies solving this problem are Arvinas, Hexagon Bio, Unnatural Products, LifeMine, FogPharma, and C4 Therapeutics. Each company is exciting for different reasons building different types of moats around IP, experiments, data, and chemistry.
For intracellular targets, the drug development industry has focused on orally bioavailable small molecules limiting opportunity to targets with accessible binding sites. Between 10%-14% of human genes produce proteins that could bind small molecules…
