Peptomyc SL

Peptomyc SL is a company focused on the development of a new generation of cell penetrating peptides (CPPs) for cancer treatment. The company was founded in December 2014 and it is based on Dr. Soucek’s scientific work focused on Myc inhibition.

Chemotherapy is currently the most common non-surgical therapeutic option for the majority of cancers. Unfortunately, it often results in poor overall outcome for the patients due to the development of resistance to these nonselective treatments. Currently the alternative to

such therapies is so-called “personalized medicine”, but very few targeted therapies have been commercialized to date and these target a restricted subset of cancers. In addition, the majority of these therapies target degenerate and redundant functions in tumor cells, resulting

once again in resistance to treatment. Myc is an oncogene causally implicated in most cancers and is often associated with aggressive, poorly differentiated and angiogenic tumors. Myc has a non-redundant function in cancer around which tumors cannot evolve, hence targeting Myc is the most promising therapeutic opportunity we have to date. However, a Myc inhibitor has yet to become clinically available.

Dr. Laura Soucek has generated Omomyc, a dominant-negative Myc mutant that is able to prevent Myc-dependent gene transactivation functions both in vitro and in vivo, negating Myc’s ability to bind its DNA recognition binding site. Omomyc has proven to be the most efficacious direct Myc inhibitor to date and appears to be therapeutically valuable in a variety, if not all, cancer types, but so far it has only been considered a proof of principle, whose application could be limited to gene therapy. However, our new results indicate that the Omomyc peptide itself displays excellent cell penetrating properties and can efficiently enter cells and exert a strong anti-Myc activity that results in arrest/death of all cancer cell lines tested so far. Peptomyc SL now aims to further develop the Omomyc peptide - and improved variants - into clinically viable therapeutics for the treatment of cancer patients.