Don Kirkpatrick (L), Zach Sweeney and Nick Galli

Af­ter go­ing down dif­fer­ent drug dis­cov­ery paths, Genen­tech vets re­unite at Fore­site Labs to map the 'pro­tein in­ter­ac­tome'

Through­out Zach Sweeney’s eight-year re­search stint at Roche/Genen­tech, one project stuck with him (quite lit­er­al­ly): a pro­gram study­ing LRRK2.

Sci­en­tists knew ear­ly on there were ge­net­ic vari­ants of the LRRK2 gene as­so­ci­at­ed with rare fa­mil­ial forms of Parkin­son’s dis­ease, but they didn’t quite know how best to ap­proach it as a tar­get. Sweeney’s col­league Don Kirk­patrick man­aged to find the ex­act site that in­creased ki­nase ac­tiv­i­ty — paving the way to de­vel­op­ing an an­ti­body that be­came a flag­ship drug and was lat­er li­censed by the team of Genen­tech vets who found­ed De­nali. Last year, Bio­gen teamed up with the neu­ro­science start­up on the drug in a deal worth over $1 bil­lion.

Endpoints News

Unlock this article instantly by becoming a free subscriber.

You’ll get access to free articles each month, plus you can customize what newsletters get delivered to your inbox each week, including breaking news.