AR-NTD
Royal Marsden and Johann de Bono
Advancing AR-NTD disease biology with clinical prostate cancer leadership at The Royal Marsden and ICR.
- Castration-resistant prostate cancer
- AR splice variants
- Biomarker-driven translation
Why we partner
AR-NTD binders must be understood in the same resistance landscape that defines modern prostate cancer care. We partner with Prof. Johann de Bono at The Royal Marsden and The Institute of Cancer Research to connect Peptone's disordered-domain chemistry to clinical disease biology, including the splice-variant and biomarker contexts that decide whether a next-generation androgen receptor therapy can matter for patients.
Scientific focus
Prof. de Bono leads prostate cancer targeted therapy and drug development programs that have shaped the treatment of advanced disease. His group's work on androgen receptor aberrations, including constitutively active splice variants such as AR-V7, established why therapies that only occupy the ligand-binding domain leave a critical escape route open. That clinical and molecular framing is essential for AR-NTD mechanism-of-action studies.
What Peptone brings
Peptone brings small molecules designed against the intrinsically disordered N-terminal domain, characterised by ensemble measurement rather than a static pocket assumption. The platform supplies compounds, biophysical engagement data, and a clear hypothesis: shut down the transcriptional activation function that resistance mechanisms continue to exploit.
What we do together
The collaboration focuses on mechanism of action and disease-relevant biology: how Peptone AR-NTD compounds behave in models and experimental systems informed by clinical resistance, circulating biomarkers, and the genomic landscape of lethal prostate cancer. The aim is to pressure-test MoA early, with access to translational insight that is difficult to recreate in isolation.
Therapeutic ambition
We collaborate to build first-in-class AR-NTD therapeutics with a clearer path from measured binding to patient-relevant biology. Access to cutting-edge clinical prostate cancer models and biomarker thinking ahead of the field is the point of the partnership: deepen disease understanding so the right molecules advance, and the wrong ones do not.