Out of CRISPR pioneer David Liu's lab comes a small molecule play targeting exosites — and it's raised a modest $25M to push toward clinic
David Liu may be best known as a CRISPR trailblazer behind Editas Medicine, Beam Therapeutics and Prime Medicine. But more than six years ago, he worked with a student from his Harvard lab and then-colleague Alan Saghatelian on a much different project: developing a small molecule inhibitor of insulin-degrading enzymes.
For close to six decades, scientists had theorized that blocking the enzyme can salvage enough insulin to treat Type 2 diabetes. The problem is that IDE, despite its name, doesn’t just degrade insulin; it also gets rid of glucagon, which is something you actually don’t want a lot of for a diabetic patient. Traditional drug discovery methods couldn’t solve the need to shut down one activity while leaving the other alone.
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