M4K Pharma is pleased to announce the appointment of Dr. Peter Sampson as the new Vice President of Drug Discovery and Development for M4K’s parent Canadian charity, Agora Open Science Trust (Agora).

In a piece to mark Childhood Cancer Awareness Month, Dr. Diana Martins Carvalho reflects on the vital support of families who generously donate tissue samples and funds that enable her research into childhood brain tumours.

In the May and September 2020 issues of the Journal of Medicinal Chemistry, the M4K team and collaborators published two articles on M4K’s open science approach and the chemistry progress to develop the inhibitors for ALK2 as a treatment for Diffuse Intrinsic Pontine Glioma (DIPG).

Our collaborator Dr Chris Jones and his fantastic team at The Institute of Cancer Research were profiled in The Observer for their work on DIPG with support from Abbie’s Army.

Congratulations to Senior Scientist Stefano Levanto from Charles River Laboratories (CRL) on winning the early career poster prize for his poster describing CRL’s open science collaboration with M4K Pharma at the 20th SCI/RSC Medicinal Chemistry Symposium in Cambridge, UK last month.

On September 29th 2019, the Brain Tumour Charity organized The Twilight Walk in Warwick, UK, to raise funds for research and patient support. M4K Pharma’s DIPG project collaborators at the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC)- University of Oxford took part in the event by hosting an activity booth and joining the walk.

Wong et al. describe in Biochemical Society Transactions how open collaboration and an open drug discovery model, like the one used by M4K Pharma, can help overcome the challenges faced while researching therapies for rare paediatric brain tumours such as DIPG.

M4K Pharma’s collaborators Dr Alex Bullock and his team from the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) at the University of Oxford shared the details of the ALK2 kinase crystal structure bound to M4K’s potent inhibitor M4K2117 in the RCSB’s Protein Data Bank (Structure 6SRH).