BPS 2022
Bicycles® are versatile vehicles for precision guided drug delivery
Kevin McDonnell
VP Chemistry, Bicycle Therapeutics
ABSTRACT
The effective deployment of various traditional and cutting-edge, potent drug modalities requires that the active pharmacophore be delivered to the desired site of action, for the required duration of action but with limited exposure to healthy tissue. Bicycles are constrained peptides, discovered from highly diverse phage display libraries that have demonstrated utility in the delivery of cytotoxins, radiochelates, immune agonists and oligonucleotides in preclinical studies. Bicycles have the potential to achieve precision guided delivery of these potent payloads through their unique combination of high affinity target antigen binding, tissue penetrance and pharmacokinetic properties. These low molecular weight and fully chemically synthetic Bicycle® drug conjugates can also be readily tuned to modulate the overall chemical properties, payload stoichiometry and payload release mechanism making them an ideal delivery modality for a range of therapeutic applications.
BIO
Dr. Kevin McDonnell obtained his undergraduate degree at the University of New Brunswick and subsequently his Ph.D. in Biology and Chemistry at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). He began his professional career developing synthetic peptides targeting the neonatal Fc receptor (FcRn) and therapeutic recombinant Fc fusion proteins at Syntonix Pharmaceuticals and Biogen. He then headed up the discovery chemistry efforts at BIND Therapeutics and drove the discovery of small molecule, peptide and protein-conjugated polymeric nanoparticles for targeted delivery of anti-cancer agents. Currently, as Vice President of Chemistry for Bicycle Therapeutics, Dr. McDonnell is responsible for advancing bicyclic peptide therapeutics in the oncology discovery programs.