The new drugs, dubbed protein degraders, could be one of the most significant advances in drugmaking technology in decades. Unlike specialized gene therapies, treatments based on protein degraders could be mass-produced in pill form. There could be a range of applications, from vanquishing drug-resistant tumors to clearing clusters of disease-causing proteins from the brains of Parkinson’s or Alzheimer’s sufferers. “No other technology has the potential to have such a broad impact,” says Nello Mainolfi, founder and president of Kymera Therapeutics, a biotech that attracted $70 million in funding in May from Vertex Pharmaceuticals Inc. to use protein degraders to tackle undisclosed specialty diseases.
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