Journal Club: Remodeling Oncogenic Transcriptomes with Ben Cravatt and Gene Yeo

Today marks the reboot of our journal club series, so you can look forward to seeing these episodes as part of our regular feed. This episode is a scientific deep dive on recent research published by Ben Cravatt, Professor in the Department of Chemistry at the Scripps Research Institute and co-founder of a diverse suite of chemoproteomic companies such as Vividion and Belharra Therapeutics, and Gene Yeo, Professor of Cellular and Molecular Medicine at the University of California, San Diego and co-founder of Locana Bio, Eclipse Bio, and Trotana Therapeutics. Ben and Gene are joined by Vineeta Agarwala, general partner at a16z Bio + Health, and bio deal team member Bryan Faust. Together, they’ll discuss some unexpected mechanistic results of finding covalent binders to a class of proteins that we are just starting to understand — RNA binding proteins — and the subsequent translational implications that they described in a recent paper published by the Cravatt and Yeo labs in Nature Chemical Biology. The paper outlines a potentially new therapeutic approach that uses small molecules to fundamentally rewire transcriptional networks in cancer cells.Additional reading:Remodeling oncogenic transcriptomes by small molecules targeting NONO