QUANTRO Therapeutics Achieves Breakthrough in Transcriptomic Drug Discovery

QUANTRO Therapeutics recently announced it has successfully completed its first ten-target multiplex-screening campaign, which yielded validated hits and functional proof of on-target activity for multiple molecular targets. This milestone further expands the capability to establish QUANTRO’s innovative QUANTROseq platform as a pioneering technology in the fight against diseases driven by transcriptional dysregulation, such as cancer and inflammation indications.

After successfully establishing its technology for single- and dual-target screenings at a current capacity of approximately one million compounds per year, QUANTRO has now completed the first-ever simultaneous 10-target multiplexing high-throughput screening (HTS). This pilot project, which screened a 10,000-compound diversity library, met all quality control criteria and achieved a 100% hit rate for both positive and negative controls. Furthermore, the QUANTROseq platform identified high-quality hits across most of the selected targets, providing deep insights into transcriptional changes as well as on-target potency and selectivity, while minimizing off-target effects.

“This achievement represents a significant breakthrough for QUANTRO and more broadly for drug discovery, unlocking unprecedented opportunities for the discovery of novel targeted therapies,” said Dr. Michael Bauer, CEO of QUANTRO. “By advancing our capabilities from single and dual target screenings now up to currently 10-target multiplexed high-throughput screenings, we are effectively profiling entire compound libraries for multiple targets, redefining the possibilities in transcription factor drug discovery. The unparalleled precision and depth of information generated by our QUANTROseq platform now enable us to rapidly create proprietary compound libraries for a wide range of targets, including those previously deemed ‘undruggable’.”

QUANTRO Therapeutics is a transcriptomic Drug Discovery and R&D company focused on building a highly innovative pipeline of modulators, inhibitors or degraders of transcription factors, transcriptional regulators and cell signaling targets. QUANTRO’s transcriptomic discovery platform is using a novel and proprietary time-resolved gene expression profiling technology to target gene transcription factors, so far considered un-druggable.

The technology is uniquely positioned to quantify changes in gene expression over time with unprecedented precision and sensitivity, overcoming the deficiencies of traditional RT-qPCR based technologies like DRUG-seq, which are limited to only measure RNA abundance, without information on transcriptional activity and dynamics.

QUANTRO was founded in 2019 as a spin-out from the prestigious research institutes IMBA and IMP in Vienna, Austria. Since 2020, the company has been supported by Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund (BIVF) and Evotec as seed investors. In total, EUR 11 million was earned in milestone-driven tranches during 2020 and 2023, complemented by undisclosed proceeds from a strategic collaboration on selected oncology targets with Boehringer Ingelheim Oncology. For more information, visit www.quantro-tx.com.