PhD student Cristina Jauset Gonzalez wins Merck Innovation Cup 2020

PhD candidate Cristina Jauset Gonzalez, IMAXT Group, has won the Merck Innovation Cup 2020, working in an international team of researchers to create a novel drug discovery platform to aid the development of treatments for cancer and other diseases.

The Merck Innovation Cup is an annual week-long competition in which PhD students and postdoctoral researchers from around the world come together to work 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, with 60 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 from our IMAXT Group joined the Drug Discovery Technologies team. Her team included researchers from Stanford University (US), the Francis Crick Institute (UK), University of California Berkley (US), Aarhus University (Denmark) and École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (Switzerland).

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.

Christina Jauset Gonzalez said “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. We are very excited that Merck will turn our proposal into reality to hopefully produce new drugs that could be used in the clinics”