QUANTRO Therapeutics secures Austrian research grant to accelerate development of their platform

QUANTRO Therapeutics, a pioneer in the discovery of first-in-class transcription factor targeting cancer treatments, announced that the company received an 18-month research grant awarded by the Austrian Research Promotion Agency (Forschungsförderungsgesellschaft, FFG) in support of a EUR 1.7 million R&D Project, catalyzing the scale-up and multi-target profiling capability of QUANTRO’s technology platform to industrial level.

The FFG program is financed by the Republic of Austria – specifically the Federal Ministry for Climate Action, Environment, Energy, Mobility, Innovation and Technology (BMK) and the Federal Ministry of Labour and Economy (BMAW) – as well as participating federal states, companies, and research organizations.

QUANTRO’s platform is the first available, proprietary technology allowing time-resolved transcriptomic profiling, which enables the identification of modulators, activators or inhibitors of transcription factors and cell signaling regulators through the quantification of transcriptional activity with unprecedented precision and sensitivity.

QUANTRO has successfully conducted its first large screening campaigns with single and dual target assays, using its novel transcriptomic discovery platform. The funds available through the FFG grant enable the company to take the platform to a new industrial level, boosting throughput by miniaturization and automation and, most importantly, multiplexing. QUANTRO is on track to develop the first 10-target transcriptomic screens for the discovery of transcription factor targets, some of which have previously been considered “undruggable”.

This expansion of multiplexing capabilities into a high-throughput screening (HTS) setting defines a new paradigm in drug discovery, by enabling the simultaneous screening for new drug candidates with multiple targets in a wide range of disease promoting signaling pathways.

The resulting data will be analyzed using QUANTRO’s proprietary bioinformatic suite of solutions to support the identification and validation of hits, which will then be further investigated in the company’s internal drug discovery programs.

“We are now taking our advanced transcriptomic technology to the next level. Our multiplexing capabilities deliver a revolution in drug discovery, as we can now investigate multiple targets in a single screen and analyze these data with our proprietary bioinformatics solutions. Effectually, we are moving away from traditional single target reporter assays and repetitive screening.

With this technology, we can now profile a compound library for multiple targets in one process; the highest level of sophistication and effectiveness ever achieved in a single screening campaign. We are thrilled and honored to receive this FFG grant, which enables us to drive our innovative ideas forward and to bring this transformative technology to the forefront of drug discovery,” – said Michael Bauer, CEO of QUANTRO.

“This grant supports the expansion of QUANTRO´s proprietary technology for the discovery of new small molecule therapies focusing on previously ‘undruggable’ targets through the implementation of time-resolved transcriptomic discovery at scale. With this FFG grant, we are now able to scale up the multiplexing capacity and automation of our platform, allowing us to maximize our opportunities to discover new starting points for developing innovative cancer therapies, ” – said Arianna Sabò, Head of Research and Discovery at QUANTRO.

About QUANTRO Therapeutics

QUANTRO Therapeutics is a transcriptomic Drug Discovery and R&D company focused on building a highly innovative pipeline of modulators, inhibitors or degraders of transcription factors, transcriptional regulators and cell signaling targets. QUANTRO´s transcriptomic discovery platform is using a novel and proprietary time-resolved gene expression profiling technology to target gene transcription factors, thus far considered un-druggable.

The technology is uniquely positioned to quantify changes in gene expression over time with unprecedented precision and sensitivity, overcoming the deficiencies of traditional RT-qPCR based technologies like DrugSeq, which are limited to only measure RNA abundance, without information on transcriptional activity and dynamics.

QUANTRO was founded in 2019 as a spin-out from the prestigious research institutes IMBA and IMP in Vienna, Austria. Since 2020, the company has been supported by Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund (BIVF) and Evotec as seed investors. In total, EUR 11 million was earned in milestone-driven tranches in 2020 and 2023, complemented by undisclosed proceeds from a Strategic Collaboration on selected oncology targets with Boehringer Ingelheim Oncology.

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