Episode description

Today marks the reboot of our journal club series, so you can look forward to seeing these episodes as part of our regular feed. 

This episode is a scientific deep dive on recent research published by Ben Cravatt, Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute and co-founder of a diverse suite of chemoproteomic companies such as Vividion and Belharra Therapeutics, and Gene Yeo, Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego and co-founder of Locana Bio, Eclipse Bio, and Trotana Therapeutics. 

Ben and Gene are joined by Vineeta Agarwala, general partner at a16z Bio + Health, and bio deal team member Bryan Faust. 

Together, they’ll discuss some unexpected mechanistic results of finding covalent binders to a class of proteins that we are just starting to understand — RNA binding proteins — and the subsequent translational implications that they described in a recent paper published by the Cravatt and Yeo labs in Nature Chemical Biology. The paper outlines a potentially new therapeutic approach that uses small molecules to fundamentally rewire transcriptional networks in cancer cells.

Additional reading:

• Remodeling oncogenic transcriptomes by small molecules targeting NONO