QUANTRO Therapeutics and IMP enter into research collaboration to accelerate transcriptomic drug discovery

QUANTRO Therapeutics, a pioneer in the discovery of first-in-class transcription factor targeting cancer treatments, announced that the company is entering into a strategic research collaboration with the group of Johannes Zuber, a world-leading expert in functional genetics and one of the co-founders of QUANTRO, at the Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna, Austria.

The goal of the collaboration is to investigate the molecular functions of transcription factor complexes that have emerged as promising targets for the development of cancer therapies.

Cancer cells depend on specific transcription factors – proteins that regulate gene expression – to maintain their abnormal behavior. While transcription factors have long been considered “undruggable”, new molecules have been found that trigger their degradation or disrupt interactions with essential co-factors. These advances have led to major breakthroughs in the treatment of some cancer types.

However, existing drugs targeting transcription have often been found only through serendipity, while their systematic discovery and development have been hampered by a lack of scalable methods to directly measure transcriptional activity.

The new collaboration focuses on expanding QUANTRO’s transcriptomic discovery approach by integrating genetic screening technologies to gain a deeper understanding of how transcription factors interact with co-factors and other regulatory proteins.

The Zuber lab at the IMP has developed advanced genetic screening and validation assays to identify and characterize such key co-factors and regulators, thereby complementing QUANTRO’s activities building an innovative proprietary transcription factor targeting R&D pipeline.

“A detailed understanding of protein binding partners is essential for developing new drugs and refining existing hits. While finding compounds that bind to transcription factors is relatively straightforward, it is often unclear whether this binding event interferes with co-factor interactions or other critical protein functions.

QUANTRO’s time-resolved transcriptomics technology can answer this question with unprecedented precision, and our genetic screens can pinpoint the relevant co-factors,” – said Johannes Zuber, Group Leader at the IMP.

“Our transcriptomic discovery platform addresses one of drug discovery’s greatest challenges – making previously ‘undruggable’ targets accessible. With our proprietary technology, we can instantly detect transcriptional changes with high precision, enabling us to focus on direct and immediate transcriptional responses.

This partnership will further strengthen our capabilities and understanding of the biology of the targets we are working on by integrating the IMP’s exceptional research expertise and by providing access to complementary know-how and resources. Together, we aim to accelerate drug discovery for currently untreatable diseases,” – said Michael Bauer, CEO of QUANTRO.

Meet the QUANTRO management at BIO-Europe in Stockholm, November 4-6.

Dr. Michael Bauer, CEO of QUANTRO, will participate in this important industry event and be available for personal meetings to discuss QUANTRO’s innovative approach to transcriptomic drug discovery. To schedule a meeting, please use the conference partnering system or reach out directly to Contact | QUANTRO.

About QUANTRO

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 DRUG-seq, 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.

About the IMP

The Research Institute of Molecular Pathology (IMP) in Vienna is a basic life science research institute largely sponsored by Boehringer Ingelheim. With over 200 scientists from 40 countries, the IMP is committed to scientific discovery of fundamental molecular and cellular mechanisms underlying complex biological phenomena. The IMP is part of the Vienna BioCenter, one of Europe’s most dynamic life science hubs with 2,800 people from over 80 countries in six research institutions, two universities, and 40 biotech companies.

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