University of Cambridge PhD candidate Cristina Jauset Gonzalez has won the Merck Innovation Cup 2020, working in an international team of postgraduates and postdocs to create a novel drug discovery platform that could lead to the development of treatments for cancer and other diseases.
The Merck Innovation Cup is an annual week-long competition in which postgraduates and postdocs from all around the world come together working in teams to develop innovative ideas that nurture new business plans with the potential to address unmet medical needs.
More than 2,000 people applied to compete in this year’s competition, from which only 60 were accepted based on their CVs and proposed ideas. Participants were grouped into ten teams of six to develop one of their team’s proposals into a full business plan over the course of a week.
Usually held at Merck KGaA headquarters in Germany, this year, because of the COVID-19 pandemic, the competition was held virtually.
Cristina Jauset Gonzalez, a PhD candidate at the Cancer Research UK Cambridge Institute, University of Cambridge, was part of the Drug Discovery Technologies team. Her team included students and postdocs from Stanford University (US), the Francis Crick Institute (UK), University of California Berkley (US), Aarhus University (Denmark) and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland).
“It has been a very inspiring and stimulating fast-paced week. I really enjoyed the constant interactions with professionals from multiple disciplines and expertise, both within our team and Merck, to come up with a feasible, creative and innovative solution to overcome current drug limitations,” says Cristina.
The Drug Discovery Technologies team was awarded the first prize for the design of a screening platform to identify and develop a novel class of protein degraders. Protein degraders are molecules with the ability to induce protein elimination inside the cells and can be used to target disease-causing proteins in conditions such as cancer, neurodegeneration, and immunological disorders.
The team proposed a new type of protein degrader, which they believe could be more universal and effective than existing ones such as PROTACs (PROteolysis TArgeting Chimeras) and can target pathological proteins considered “undruggable” and for which there are currently no effective degraders. They developed a screening platform to identify new compounds that have the desired properties to be used as protein degraders, speeding up the process of drug discovery.
The team has been awarded €20,000 and their idea will now be implemented into Merck's pipeline for further development.