NEW YORK — Proxima, an artificial intelligence and data-driven biotechnology company focused on proximity therapeutics, has appointed three scientists to its Scientific Advisory Board: Raymond Deshaies, Ph.D., Lyn Jones, Ph.D., and Juri Rappsilber, Ph.D.
The company said the new advisors bring decades of experience in drug discovery, chemical biology, and structural proteomics that will help guide development of Proxima’s platform for designing proximity-based medicines. Proxima, formerly known as VantAI, uses large-scale structural biology data and machine learning to identify molecules that can harness the cell’s natural biological machinery to treat disease.
Deshaies is widely known for co-inventing the proteolysis-targeting chimera, or PROTAC, concept and is considered a pioneer in the field of targeted protein degradation. He previously served as Senior Vice President of Global Research at Amgen and is a member of the National Academy of Sciences.
“Some of the most powerful drugs ever discovered, such as lenalidomide and thalidomide, turned out to work by hijacking the cell’s own protein disposal machinery. Viruses do the same thing: they commandeer ubiquitin ligases to trick the cell into trashing its own antiviral defenses,” said Deshaies. “The principle of induced proximity is using small molecules to leverage tools from nature’s playbook, and we’ve barely scratched the surface of what’s therapeutically possible with it. What we’ve lacked is the structural and systems biology data to systematically exploit this principle, and Proxima generates exactly that data at proteome scale.”
Jones, a Principal Investigator at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute and former Head of Chemical Biology at Pfizer, is known for his work in molecular glue therapeutics and approaches to expand the range of proteins that can be targeted by drug therapies.
“The human genome encodes more than 600 E3 ubiquitin ligases, and thousands of other proteins with potential in proximity applications, but we’ve built almost everything so far on just two of them,” Jones said. “If we want to expand the druggable proteome, we need to understand the protein interfaces of new effector proteins in detail. To get there, you need structural data on these interfaces at a scale that hasn’t yet existed.”
Rappsilber, a professor of bioanalytics at Technische Universität Berlin and a former professor of proteomics at the University of Edinburgh, has pioneered cross-linking mass spectrometry, a technique used to map protein interactions and structures within cells.
“The limiting factor in cross-linking mass spectrometry has historically been throughput: generating enough distance restraints, across enough of the interactome, to move from validating individual structures to building comprehensive structural models,” Rappsilber said. “Proxima’s platform represents an important step in this direction. By industrializing cross-linking mass spectrometry as a critical data modality and pairing it directly with computational structure prediction, Proxima is demonstrating what becomes possible when this data is generated at a depth and scale the field has long envisioned but that has remained elusive until now.”
Proxima’s technology platform integrates large-scale structural biology data with machine learning to better understand protein interactions and identify new ways to design small molecules that alter those interactions. The company said the approach could help expand the range of diseases that can be targeted by drug therapies.
According to Proxima, the platform is already being used in collaborations with pharmaceutical companies and research partners to explore new proximity-based therapeutic strategies, including transcription factor relocalization, epigenetic modulation, and other emerging drug discovery approaches.
