Senolytic start-up establishes collaboration with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center to advance idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis program.
Silicon Valley start-up Rubedo Life Sciences today announced a collaboration with Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, to advance its idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) senolytic theraputics program and establish collaborative studies. As part of the collaboration, Dr Cory Hogaboam, professor of medicine and research scientist at Cedars-Sinai will be joining Rubedo’s Scientific Advisory Board.
Longevity.Technology: Affecting around 100,000 people in the US, IPF is a rare, but serious lung disease that causes a build-up of scar tissue in the lungs. When we spoke with Rubedo earlier this year, CEO Dr Marco Quarta expressed concern that the COVID-19 pandemic may lead to a surge in IPF cases, and that he hoped to bring a therapeutic to the clinic “as soon as possible”.
Rubedo’s main program targets senescent cells, which accumulate in multiple tissues in our bodies as we age and promote inflammation, fibrosis and cancer. Cellular senescence is a master regulator of aging and drives many age-related diseases.
“Rubedo’s strategy for entry into the longevity space is a senolytic program, targeting the pro inflammatory and pro fibrotic senescent cells,” said Quarta in a statement. “Our first clinical program will be IPF, which is an unmet medical need and we look forward to working with Cedars Sinai Medical Center.”
Taking senolytics to the clinic
Commenting on today’s news, Quarta told us, “Together with the team at Cedars-Sinai we are building an innovative pipeline that will allow to solidly advance Rubedo’s therapeutic discovery program for IPF into the clinic.
“We are excited to work with world-class experts in interstitial lung diseases at Cedars-Sinai. In particular, Professor Hogaboam is a fantastic advisor and collaborator. He brings a deep understanding of IPF pathology, the clinical landscape but also of cellular senescence and its role in IPF disease.”
Unique among senolytic therapies
Dr Hogaboam’s distinguished career encompasses more than 20 years of scientific experience and he is also an adjunct professor of pathology at the University of Michigan Medical School.
“I joined forces advising and collaborating with Rubedo because throughout my career working on IPF, I came to the conclusion that targeting cellular senescence is the only way to unlock a possible cure for this devastating age-related disease,” he said. “Among all the proposed senolytic therapies, Rubedo has a unique platform that promises to successfully deliver an effective pharmacological treatment for IPF.”
Rubedo’s proprietary Alembic drug discovery platform combines computational and chemistry proprietary technologies to generate novel prodrugs that selectively target multiple pathologic cell types (including rare cell types) driving age-related diseases.
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