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).

Scientists at The Institute of Cancer Research, London, along with colleagues at the Structural Genomics Consortium in Oxford, have published their findings on a new drug class that can kill brain cancer cells with mutations in the ACVR1 gene and shrink tumours in mice.

Following in the path of M4K Pharma, M4ND will tackle neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson’s disease, thanks to funding from the Krembil Foundation, and will commit to open science practises, open sharing of data, and affordable pricing.

Richard Gold (McGill University) and Max Morgan (SGC, M4k Pharma) penned an opinion piece in the Globe and Mail discussing how open science projects with no patents can result in local economic development, citing the recent $1Billion investment deal that Celgene signed with the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) and their commercialization arm FACIT to advance a potential drug for leukemia.

How can a company take advantage of regulatory exclusivity to launch an open science drug discovery program? Max Morgan et al explain in their paper.

OICR-funded drug discovery project’s unique ‘open science’ business model is accelerating the search for a solution to lethal pediatric brain cancers.