In the battle against cancer, scientists from the drug discovery company Sprint Bioscience and researchers from MAX IV have taken important steps together toward developing new and more efficient cancer drugs with the help of fragment screening by X-ray crystallography.
Cancer accounts for nearly one out of six deaths yearly. It begins when one or more genes in a cell mutate, creating an abnormal protein or preventing a protein’s formation.
Therefore, you need to start at the protein level to fight cancer.
Sprint Bioscience is working to develop new drug candidates by identifying small molecules (fragments) that can bind targeted cancer proteins. In collaboration with researchers from the FragMAX team at MAX IV during 2019 and 2020, Sprint Bioscience optimised and developed a protein crystallisation system corresponding to a cancer protein chosen by the company.
Read more on MAX IV website
Image: Crystal incubated with fragment XB00143 mounted on the BioMAX beamline during the screening campaign.
Credit: Sprint Bioscience/BioMAX