On the heels of announcing a restructuring plan that reduces its workforce by 30%, Black Diamond Therapeutics (Nasdaq:BDTX) has announced that its discovery engine was featured in the peer-reviewed Cancer Research journal.
The journal is published by American Association for Cancer Research (AACR).
A paper highlighted in the journal explained how the company’s Mutation-Allostery-Pharmacology (MAP) discovery engine identified and experimentally validated 22 new oncogenic HER2 driver mutations.
The paper is titled “Computational and Functional Analyses of HER2 Mutations Revealing Allosteric Activation Mechanisms and Altered Pharmacologic Effects.”
The analysis highlights work from researchers at Black Diamond Therapeutics and Foundation Medicine (Cambridge, Massachusetts), who used the MAP discovery engine to produce a list of 222 known and potential driver mutations from 820 single-nucleotide variants.
The scientists screened 111 using Ba/F3-retrovirus proliferation assays to obtain a list of 37 HER2 driver mutations. A total of 15 of those mutations were previously identified, while 22 were novel oncogenic mutations.
The researchers concluded that the discovery of the mutations could highlight the need for novel inhibitors targeting HER2-mutant cancers.
In addition, the paper described the pharmacological characterization of the HER2-driver mutations.
“These findings support our overall approach to cancer treatment by demonstrating the value and importance of oncogenicity prediction, biological validation, protein conformation-based drug design and MasterKey inhibitor development against mutation families,” said Elizabeth Buck, chief scientific officer of Black Diamond Therapeutics, in a news release.