Vividion Therapeutics
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Who leads Vividion?
Vividion is led by Diego Miralles (CEO) with the founders being Benjamin Cravatt, Phil Baran, and Jin-Quan Yu. Diego is the former president of Adaptive Biotechnologies and a former Johnson & Johnson executive. Benjamin, Phil and Jin-Quan are on faculty at Scripps.
What does Vividion do?
Vividion focuses on discovering targeted protein degradation therapeutics like proteolysis targeting chimeras (PROTAC). The company’s comparable is Arvinas -
Vividion has taken some of the IP from Scripps to build out a proteomics pipeline to discover small molecules that target new E3 ligases as well as other high-value targets.
The idea for Vividion is to discover bifunctional small molecules that engage a target as well as an E3 ligase to selectively degrade the target:
What makes Vividion unique?
Vividion is taking a piece of the Arvinas playbook but focusing on mapping out more E3 ligases. Out of the 600 or so E3 ligases out there, under 10 have been used to develop new medicines. Currently used E3 ligases can degrade certain proteins, but are often limited by tissue expression and their ubiquitin modification types. Vividion is expanding the toolkit of targeted protein degradation by engineering new E3 ligases for drug development.
Why I like what Vividion is doing?
Vividion is a pretty simple business - they are pursuing the very large opportunity of mapping out E3 ligases in a field with high demand. Arvinas is the first to bring PROTACs to humans; with their progress every biopharma company is placing a piece within the targeted protein degradation field.
Vividion uses its unique focus to build a business model with an internal pipeline and two sizable deals with Celgene and Roche. Simply, Vividion has been able to focus early (2013) on a problem that wasn’t completely recognized. Arvinas was able to get phase 1 data in humans this year. So Vividion had to build out the E3 ligase platform and pipeline over several years before the market caught up with them. But this conviction, anchored on a deep scientific understanding of PROTACs, has given the company an incredible position to more efficiently develop new medicines and expand the capabilities of targeted protein degradation.
You can find Vividion here.