IRIC - Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer

Published on September 27, 2016

Domain Therapeutics will get exclusive access to a new set of more powerful biosensors that will facilitate profiling of more effective and safer drug candidates
Strasbourg (France) and Montreal (Canada), September 27, 2016 – Domain Therapeutics, a France- and Quebec-based biopharmaceutical company that specializes in the research and development of new drug candidates that target G protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), announces today the signing of a second licensing and partnership agreement on GPCR biosensor technology with Université de Montréal (UdeM) and its commercialization unit, the Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer – Commercialization of Research (IRICoR), as well as with McGill University (McGill). The first licencing agreement was signed at the end of 2013.

The novel GPCR biosensor technology was developed by a team of Investigators from UdeM’s Institute for Research in Immunology and Cancer (IRIC) led by Pr. Michel Bouvier, and from McGill, led by Pr. Stéphane Laporte. Drs. Bouvier and Laporte are internationally renowned for their work on GPCRs.

The agreement gives Domain Therapeutics exclusive access to a new set of more powerful biosensors developed by Drs. Bouvier and Laporte.

This new approach, based on the existing BioSens-All™ technology which was initially licensed from UdeM and McGill, makes it possible to assess more intracellular signalling pathways and to discriminate more accurately the functional activation associated with specific GPCRs, which will accelerate the discovery and development of biased ligands for this class of receptors.

With this novel generation of biosensors, Domain Therapeutics North America Inc., the Canadian affiliate of Domain Therapeutics, will complete its unique service offering in profiling drug candidates for the pharma and biotech industries. Domain Therapeutics also leverages a screening platform called DTect-All™, designed to discover allosteric modulator drugs that target GPCRs. By combining the two technologies, Domain Therapeutics can discover and optimize more effective and safer therapeutic candidates for its internal programs and for collaborative programs with industry partners.