DICE Therapeutics Inc

DICE Therapeutics, Inc., formerly Dice Molecules Holdings LLC, is a biopharmaceutical company. The Company leverages its technology platform to build a pipeline of oral therapeutic candidates to treat chronic diseases in immunology and other therapeutic areas. It is focused on developing oral therapeutics against targets in immunology. The Company’s platform, which it refers to as DELSCAPE, is designed to discover selective oral small molecules with the potential to modulate protein-protein interactions (PPIs) as effectively as systemic biologics.

Our DELSCAPE platform leverages DNA-encoded libraries (DELs) in a novel way that we believe improves our ability to prosecute historically difficult targets such as PPIs with oral small molecule inhibitors.

Whereas DEL has traditionally been used as a hit-finding approach with a high premium on highly diverse libraries containing tens of billions of chemicals, we have found a very different approach to be highly effective in the identification of lead compounds for the inhibition of PPIs. We build customized DELs for each target we pursue, incorporating known binding elements into our design.

These seed elements may have poor potency or selectivity, but can greatly enhance our ability to find hits with improved properties in these focused libraries. With our proprietary approach, we generate smaller, targeted libraries, typically between 100,000 and 1 million discrete compounds, and obtain data that enables both quantitative and qualitative assessment of a landscape of small molecule hits.

Our approach can extend well beyond binding optimization to further produce insights into functional activity and selectivity. We think of this process as performing medicinal chemistry on a very large scale, in parallel, and it is what allows us to accelerate this phase of drug discovery against difficult PPI targets.