CAMBRIDGE, England and BOSTON–(BUSINESS WIRE)–Bicycle Therapeutics plc (NASDAQ: BCYC), a biotechnology company pioneering a new, differentiated class of therapeutics based on its proprietary bicyclic peptide (Bike®) technology, today announced that a paper highlighting data using tris-gold complexes to increase the chemical diversity of Bikeswas published in Chemistry of bioconjugates. The article, titled “Gold-Mediated Multiple Cysteine Arylation for the Construction of Highly Constrained Bicycle Peptides” is available in the publications section of the Bicycle website at this address. link.
“Research published in Chemistry of bioconjugates demonstrates that gold-mediated cysteine arylation can be used as an approach for building new highly constrained systems Bikes under conditions previously demonstrated compatible with reactions on biological systems such as bacteriophages, highlighting the potential for use for new Bike targets move forward. Evaluation of the suitability of this methodology for Bicycle phage screening is ongoing,” said Kevin Lee, Ph.D., CEO of Bicycle Therapeutics. “The article adds to the wealth of scientific papers coming from our company, and the ramp-up to production is a testament to the robustness of our platform and the hard work and quality of the Bicycle team.
Bikes are formed by the reaction of three cysteine residues in a linear sequence with a scaffold of trivalent and symmetrical small molecules. Bikes with high binding affinities to therapeutically important targets are discovered using proprietary phage display technology. Tris-Gold complexes have recently been described as a method for efficient bioconjugation of cysteine residues under conditions we believe to be compatible with phage display. The article illustrates an approach for constructing new, strongly constrained Bikes.
About Bicycle Therapeutics
Bicycle Therapeutics (NASDAQ: BCYC) is a clinical-stage biopharmaceutical company developing a new class of drugs, called Bikesfor diseases underserved by existing therapies. Bikes are fully synthetic short peptides constrained by small molecule scaffolds to form two loops that stabilize their structural geometry. This constraint facilitates binding to the target with high affinity and selectivity, making Bikes attractive candidates for drug development. Bicycle is currently evaluating BT5528, a second-generation Bicycle Toxin Conjugate (BTC™) targeting EphA2; BT8009, a second-generation BTC targeting Nectin-4, a well-validated tumor antigen; and BT7480, a Bicycle TICA™ targeting Nectin-4 and stressful CD137, in company-sponsored Phase I/II trials. Additionally, BT1718, a BTC that targets MT1-MMP, is being studied in an ongoing Phase I/IIa clinical trial sponsored by the Cancer Research UK Center for Drug Development. Bicycle is headquartered in Cambridge, UK, with many key functions and members of its management team located in Lexington, Massachusetts. For more information, visit bicycletherapeutics.com.
