Ambagon Therapeutics

Ambagon Therapeutics builds a small-molecule discovery platform around 14-3-3 adaptor proteins, drawing on several years of structural biology research at Eindhoven University of Technology. Its modality is the molecular glue: compounds that stabilise the direct interaction between 14-3-3 and a client protein, restoring or blocking that protein's function. The molecular glue approach is directed at serious unmet needs in cancer, metabolic disorders, neurodegenerative disease and infectious disease.

Conventional small-molecule discovery needs a ligandable pocket, which leaves many high-value targets with highly disordered regions out of reach; Ambagon instead imposes order on those regions by stabilising a 14-3-3:client complex, and that mechanism is the axis on which it differentiates. The company applies it to transcription factors and adaptor or scaffolding proteins it describes as inaccessible to other approaches, widening the set of targets small molecules can address.