Our Science
Overcoming cellular regulation is essential for developing breakthrough biologics, gene therapies, and vaccines.
ExcepGen's scientific platform is focused on developing next generation technology to address cellular regulation explicitly and systematically in the drug discovery and drug development process. Our regulation-centric platform allows us to envision conceptually new treatment types. By programming cells to be less vulnerable to external stimuli, we can target complex proteins and their associated signaling pathways with novel, enduring, and holistic therapeutic approaches.
Until now, this has been impossible. At ExcepGen, we've demonstrated that inhibiting the cell's ability to negatively respond to external stimuli has enormous potential to improve the drug discovery and development process.
Our Approach
Tame Complexity
We streamline complex cellular communication making the input-to-output function reliable.
Achieve Impossibilities
We can access previously impossible drug targets which allows us to discover novel therapeutics.
Challenge Assumptions
We boldly strive for disease elimination by confronting "first principles" in biology.
Roadmap
Preventative and Therapeutic Vaccines
COVID-19 Preventative Vaccine
Our COVID-19 program leverages core ExcepGen technology to express multiple antigens of the SARS-CoV-2 virus, enabling virus-like particle self-assembly.
Future Forward
We plan to expand into additional infectious diseases, cancer, and other therapeutic vaccines.
Gene-delivered Therapies
ExcepGen Antibody
We are developing a vectored, gene-encoded therapeutic antibody with the aim of enabling the body to produce its own durable, stable expression of a therapeutic in vivo (vs. traditional manufactured antibody drugs).
Future Forward
We plan to expand into broader applications including auto-immune diseases and enzyme replacement therapies.
Drug Discovery
Antibody Discovery Program
We're using ExcepGen technology to create antibodies that target previously inaccessible GPCRs and ion channels.
Future Forward
We plan to expand into additional targets over time.
Our Technology
Cellular regulation is essential for biological success, but can hinder drug discovery
Biological systems operate within a certain range of limits. In that range, they must be responsive enough to receive information from the external environment while, at the same time, able to resist large changes induced by external stimuli. This makes cells adaptable and functionally reliable. Indeed, to ensure their adaptability and functionality, cells use multiple, often redundant molecular regulatory mechanisms. These include activation or deactivation of signaling pathways, gene expression changes, protein alterations, and more.
Regulatory mechanisms form networks whose complexity and interconnectedness can significantly hinder drug discovery and development. Often, drug candidates are only targeted under one specific network state, even though cellular networks can adapt and change. Until now, it has been difficult to create drugs that alter cells in multiple contexts and reliably treat disease.
Creating more effective drugs by understanding regulation
At ExcepGen, we’re using our knowledge of cellular regulation to create more effective drugs. For instance we can:
Produce proteins that look and act like their natural counterparts
Often, researchers want to create drugs that target complex proteins. However, these complex proteins may natively adopt particular structures that are hard to reproduce outside of their natural cellular/organismal context. With our knowledge of the regulatory mechanisms that impact protein production, we can produce proteins that look and function like their natural counterparts. By using these proteins as natural targets, we can develop more effective drugs and therapeutics.
Create gene therapies with more consistent gene expression
While gene therapies are highly promising, they often fail because the genes they introduce cease to express over time. At ExcepGen, we understand and can overcome the regulatory mechanisms that lead to this decreased expression. Thus, we can create gene therapies with sustained gene expression and better clinical results.
Design more effective vaccines
Current vaccines often introduce the immune system to parts of pathogens. The immune system will fight off the pathogen any time it sees these parts in the future. While this can be highly successful, the immune system does not respond to all parts of the pathogen and the targeted parts may mutate. This can render the vaccines less effective over time.
Classically, cell regulatory mechanisms have made it difficult to introduce multiple components of a pathogen to the immune system through vaccines. With our technology, we can overcome these regulatory mechanisms and make vaccines that better resemble full pathogens. With these vaccines, the immune system can generate fuller and more robust responses that will fight off pathogens more effectively.
Bridge target-based and network-based drug discovery processes
Researchers often try to create drugs that target one specific protein in isolation. However, when used in a more natural cellular context, these drugs and their targets have many interactions with other cellular components. These interactions can mitigate the intended effects of conventional drugs and make treatments less effective.
To get around this issue, many researchers have attempted to instead screen drugs using phenotypic, cell-based assays in a more natural environment. Rather than looking for drugs that bind to very specific targets, they look for cells that respond in a particular way. The drugs discovered in this way may produce the desired effects, but they are difficult to optimize because researchers usually don’t understand how exactly they work.
With our technologies, we can test drugs for their ability to target specific proteins in a much more natural environment while monitoring how cellular regulatory networks respond. Thus we can optimize drugs both for their ability to interact with particular targets and their ability to alter the regulatory network.
The know-how that has brought us here is not what can drive us forward
To sustain drug development and innovation in the future, radical changes must be made to how biological systems are used in research. Cellular regulation must be addressed explicitly and systematically in drug discovery and development. This will give researchers access to high-quality, fully natural human proteins that they can use to find and validate complex or uncharacterized proteins as novel drug targets. Addressing gene regulation will also unlock the potential of vaccines and gene therapies involving difficult proteins of interest.
Beyond classical drugs and vaccines, understanding and applying the concept of cellular regulation will enable the development of new treatment modalities. By controlling cellular regulation, we can lower cellular resistance to external stimuli, expand the window of opportunity for therapeutic interventions, and target complex proteins and signaling pathways.
ExcepGen’s technology, which interacts with cellular regulation at its very basis, makes all of this possible.
