Biotech Company Pioneers Technology For New Class of Drugs

Dormer Stephen, Co-Chair of our Business and Finance practice area, structured and negotiated this deal for Arvinas. Arvinas is built on the research of Craig Crews, PhD, Lewis B. Cullman Professor of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology and professor of Chemistry and Pharmacology at Yale University. The new drugs being developed by Arvinas would induce a cell’s own protein-degradation capabilities to bind to a particular protein and “label” it for degradation, thus removing a protein from the system entirely. This contrasts to a more traditional drug development approach that inhibits proteins. However, only 25 percent of the body’s 20,000 proteins can be inhibited. Proteins that cannot be inhibited can potentially be degraded using Arvinas’ approach, radically expanding the number of disease-causing proteins that can become the targets of new drugs.