Proudly we announce the start of FuturedMe Inc., as the fruit of three years project of START (program for creating STart-ups from Advanced Research and Technology) backed by JST (Japan Science and Technology agency). FuturedMe Inc. with an innovative protein degradation technology CANDDY (Chemical knockdown with Affinities aNd Degradation DYnamics) results of the researches lead by Professor Etsuko Miyamoto-Sato at Tokyo University of Science(TUS). We concluded an exclusive license agreement of CANDDY with TUS and succeeded in raising around 700 million yen as Series A financing lead by JAFCO. With this fund, we started our project of creating new CANNDY compounds targeting “undruggable” pathogenic proteins including typical undruggable target like RAS that many of researchers haven’t yet created effective therapies with conventional methods. Furthermore, we signed a joint research agreement with TUS, under this agreement, we’re bringing in abundant technological resources in TUS and started collaborative researches to accelerate selected CANDDY programs. We are promoting our promising projects under our corporate philosophy “No Patients without Medicine”.
 
As it’s said that the only 25% of pathogenic proteins are druggable, that means 75% of pathogenic proteins are still causing serious diseases without any effective therapies, it’s the common issue in our world. Unfortunately, we know the reason of diseases but we don’t have any solution to these miserable status. So, this 75% is our target, that any of current technologies and methodologies haven’t achieved to bring effective solutions to these diseases.
 
Protein degradation is naturally observed in our body and its key role is performed by proteasomes. Our CANDDY technology has succeeded in controlling this protein degradation steps and proteasome enzymatic activities. CANDDY is skipping ubiquitination in proteasomal degradation pathway, this is a significant difference from any other protein degradation systems strongly depend on ubiquitination. This ubiquitin independent system makes us possible in designing chemical compounds ignoring affinities with other enzymes and also in targeting ubiquitination resistant proteins.
 
We have already started several projects to overcome the issue around undruggable targets and we are trying this challenge so long as despaired patients are suffering from serious diseases without any effective therapies. One of our most important programs is releasing such patients from their agonies and delivering healthy life, and we’ll announce you some of collaborative works with pharmaceutical companies in the near future.