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Antoxerene are developing drugs that target senescent cells

Summary

ANTOXERENE is a pharmaceutical company that is developing first-in-class, small-molecule senolytic drugs for targeting the pathways of aging. It is held by Ichor Therapeutics, Inc.

The protein p53 is critical in tumor suppression, damage sensing, apoptosis, and senescence. The company has developed a proprietary protein tagging system that allows normally folded p53 to be created and expressed in large quantities, paving the way to therapies that deal with this complicated molecule.

While p53 was once a common target in cancer studies, as the protein is often heavily mutated in cancer cells, Antoxerene intends to base its therapy around the interactions between p53 and FOXO4, another large protein that is critical in cellular function and that the company has managed to synthesize.

Using high-throughput assays, the company has discovered many compounds that work on p53 and other compounds that only function on FOXO4. It plans on using this data to develop a small-molecule senolytic.

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