Vicinitas Therapeutics

Many diseases, including cancer and monogenic diseases, are often caused by specific proteins that are abnormally degraded and lost from the cell. In cancer, protective tumor suppressors are aberrantly destroyed, allowing cancer cells to circumvent cell death, thus promoting unobstructed cell proliferation. To date, many aberrantly degraded proteins have been considered “undruggable” or intractable to drug discovery efforts. Vicinitas Therapeutics is a biotechnology company focused on targeted protein stabilizers known as Deubiquitinase Targeting Chimeras (DUBTACs). The company’s mission is to use this proprietary technology to solve critical problems in human health by developing next-generation disease therapies against an entire class of previously inaccessible disease-causing proteins. Spun out of an academic-industry collaboration between Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research and the University of California, Berkeley, Vicinitas Therapeutics is based in South San Francisco, California.