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).

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.

Reaction Biology Corporation (“RBC”), a leading contract research organization providing early stage drug discovery services, announced that it has partnered with M4K Pharma (“M4K”), an open science drug discovery and development company, in the fight against diffuse intrinsic pontine glioma (or DIPG), a rare pediatric brain cancer with no curative therapies.

Watch the M4K team in Toronto complete the #LemonFaceChallenge to spread DIPG awareness, along with the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) and the Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR).

In a podcast interview with Bio2040, CEO Owen Roberts discusses M4K Pharma’s business model and why open science and sharing can be the path to finding medicines for rare diseases like DIPG.

In January 2018, a group of post-doctoral fellows at the Structural Genomics Consortium (SGC) undertook the bold task of sharing their real-time and unpolished experimental results through open lab notebooks online in a mission to facilitate collaboration and transparency and to reduce duplication of effort.

In an Editorial to the Canadian Science Policy Centre, Drs. Aled Edwards and Aidan Hollis describe the need for Open Source Drug Discovery to address the inefficiencies in developing new drugs and the resulting exorbitant prices of new medicines.

The Ontario Institute for Cancer Research (OICR) announced its Cancer Therapeutics Innovation Pipeline (CTIP) initiative and the first 10 projects selected for the inaugural round of funding. CTIP will support the local translation of Ontario discoveries into therapies by creating a new drug development pipeline and by working with the research teams to attract further investments for clinical development.

The latest medical innovation to spring from Aled Edwards’s University of Toronto lab isn’t a new protein structure or potential drug target – it’s a business model.

Thanks to advances in genomics research, it’s rapidly becoming apparent many illnesses can be splintered into ever smaller categories of disease, each affecting a relatively small number of people. Hence all the buzz about developing “personalized” medicines.