InduPro Publishes Nature Study Defining New Proximity-Based Targets for Cancer Therapeutics
InduPro, Inc., a biotechnology company developing novel therapeutics for cancer and autoimmune diseases through protein proximity biology, has announced the publication of new research in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Nature. The study establishes the spatial organization of cell-surface proteins as a previously underexplored and potentially therapeutically actionable dimension of disease biology, providing a foundation for discovering new targets and designing differentiated medicines.
The publication, titled “Proximity-Guided Graph Learning Reveals Tumor-Associated Proximity Antigens,” describes an integrated discovery approach developed by InduPro to map nanoscale protein neighborhoods on the surface of tumor cells. By examining how proteins are positioned relative to one another rather than focusing only on their individual expression levels, the company has identified disease-associated spatial relationships that could create new opportunities for therapeutic intervention.
A central concept introduced in the research is the Tumor-Associated Proximity Antigen, or TAPA. These represent a new class of co-targets defined by the spatial proximity of cell-surface proteins in a disease context. The approach could potentially expand the range of targets available for therapeutic development and support the design of multispecific medicines capable of recognizing disease-associated protein neighborhoods.
The research also provides the scientific foundation for InduPro’s proximity-guided therapeutic pipeline, including IDP-001, the company’s lead bispecific antibody-drug conjugate (ADC), which has advanced into Phase 1 clinical development.
Exploring the Spatial Organization of Cell-Surface Proteins
Traditional drug discovery and target identification have largely concentrated on determining which proteins are expressed by cells and how much of a particular protein is present. Although expression remains an important biological characteristic, proteins on the cell surface do not operate independently.
Cell-surface proteins occupy dynamic, organized environments that can influence signaling, trafficking, interactions between cells, and responses to therapeutic agents. The spatial relationship between proteins may therefore provide information that cannot be captured by expression measurements alone.
InduPro’s research focuses on this previously less explored layer of cell biology. Its platform is designed to systematically identify proteins that exist within defined nanoscale neighborhoods and determine whether those spatial relationships are associated with disease.
The company believes that this proximity information can reveal biological relationships that remain hidden when target discovery relies solely on conventional expression-based methods.
Scott Lesley, Ph.D., President and Chief Scientific Officer of InduPro, said the company has worked to industrialize high-resolution proximity mapping while combining it with computational approaches capable of analyzing protein neighborhoods at scale.
According to Lesley, this approach enables InduPro to uncover biology that expression-based approaches alone may not reveal. The resulting TAPA framework provides not only a new category of targets but also a way of designing medicines around protein relationships enriched within specific disease contexts.
From Proximity Mapping to a Scalable Discovery Platform
The technology underlying the research was invented by Rob Oslund, Ph.D., Vice President of Platform Technology, and Niyi Fadeyi, Ph.D., Vice President of Chemical Sciences. Both scientists are members of InduPro’s founding team.
The original technology was developed to label proteins within defined nanoscale environments. InduPro subsequently industrialized and expanded the technology into a scalable discovery platform capable of generating large datasets describing cell-surface protein neighborhoods.
In the Nature study, researchers applied the approach across diverse tumor systems. The resulting datasets provided a detailed view of the spatial organization of proteins on tumor cell surfaces and demonstrated that proximity measurements can reveal biological information beyond conventional expression data.
This ability to generate proximity information at scale is central to InduPro’s strategy. Instead of relying on isolated observations of protein interactions or individual target pairs, the company is building a broader dataset that can be analyzed collectively to identify recurring spatial patterns.
The company subsequently developed MetaMap to help interpret these datasets and identify relationships that may not be immediately apparent from individual proximity experiments.
MetaMap Uses Computational Analysis to Identify Protein Relationships
MetaMap was developed to move InduPro’s proximity discovery capabilities beyond individual protein maps. The system integrates proximity signatures across targets and biological contexts to identify protein communities and predict spatial relationships between proteins, including relationships that have not been directly mapped against one another.
Graph-based machine learning is incorporated into the approach to prioritize these relationships for therapeutic discovery.
The use of computational analysis is important because the number of potential protein relationships can become extremely large as proximity datasets expand. Machine learning can help researchers identify patterns within those datasets and determine which relationships may warrant further biological and therapeutic investigation.
Oslund said the technology has evolved significantly from its original application as a tool for labeling proteins in defined nanoscale environments.
He described the industrialization of the technology as a critical step because it enabled the company to generate proximity datasets at scale. MetaMap builds on that foundation by allowing researchers to learn across the collective dataset rather than treating each experiment as an isolated observation.
The ultimate goal is to create a predictive understanding of protein relationships that can support the discovery of new therapeutic opportunities.
Tumor-Associated Proximity Antigens Introduce New Target Concept
The definition of Tumor-Associated Proximity Antigens is one of the key advances described in the publication.
Traditional target discovery often evaluates whether a protein is overexpressed or selectively present in tumor cells compared with healthy tissue. While this strategy has produced numerous therapeutic targets, not every disease-associated protein has sufficient selectivity or biological characteristics to serve as an effective standalone target.
TAPAs introduce another dimension by considering where proteins are located relative to one another in a disease-specific context.
Under this framework, a protein does not necessarily have to be highly tumor-specific by itself to contribute to a therapeutically useful target relationship. Instead, its proximity to another therapeutically relevant cell-surface antigen may create a disease-associated molecular signature that can be exploited.
This could enable the development of multispecific therapies designed to recognize a particular protein neighborhood rather than targeting either protein independently.
Niyi Fadeyi, Ph.D., Vice President of Chemical Sciences at InduPro, described TAPAs as a different way of thinking about therapeutic targets. Rather than asking only which proteins are expressed in disease, the approach asks which proteins come together in a disease-specific environment and whether that relationship can be translated into a therapeutic opportunity.
The company believes this could expand the available target space while providing opportunities to improve therapeutic selectivity, internalization and activity.
Translating Spatial Biology Into Therapeutic Design
The Nature study goes beyond mapping protein proximity by demonstrating how spatial relationships can be translated into therapeutic strategies.
InduPro combined proximity-defined antigen relationships with biological and translational information to investigate whether co-targeting specific antigen pairs could produce differentiated therapeutic effects.
According to the company, these studies demonstrated that proximity-defined antigen pairs can be leveraged to achieve differentiated tumor-cell internalization and killing across therapeutic modalities.
Internalization is particularly relevant to antibody-based therapeutic approaches, including antibody-drug conjugates, because efficient uptake of a targeted molecule into cancer cells can influence delivery of a therapeutic payload.
By identifying spatial relationships that may promote distinct cellular behavior, InduPro aims to use proximity biology not simply as a target-discovery tool but as a design principle for developing new medicines.
This approach provides the foundation for the company’s broader therapeutic pipeline.
IDP-001 Advances Into Clinical Development
A key example of the translation of InduPro’s proximity biology into drug development is IDP-001, the company’s lead bispecific antibody-drug conjugate.
IDP-001 has advanced into Phase 1 clinical development, marking a significant step in the progression of InduPro’s platform from discovery research toward human clinical testing.
The candidate illustrates the company’s broader strategy of identifying disease-associated protein relationships and using those discoveries to design therapeutics with differentiated mechanisms.
The transition from high-resolution proximity mapping to a clinical-stage therapeutic represents several stages of platform development. InduPro first established the ability to characterize nanoscale protein environments, then industrialized that technology to generate larger datasets. The company subsequently developed MetaMap to integrate and interpret those datasets, used computational approaches to identify and prioritize spatial relationships, and defined TAPAs as a new category of therapeutically relevant targets.
IDP-001 represents the next stage of that progression: converting proximity-defined biology into an investigational medicine.
Building a New Dimension of Drug Discovery
InduPro’s work reflects a broader effort to expand how researchers identify and evaluate therapeutic targets. Protein expression remains a fundamental component of modern drug discovery, but the company’s research suggests that spatial organization may provide additional information that can be used to distinguish disease biology.
By studying which proteins are positioned near one another in tumor cells, researchers may be able to uncover relationships that are invisible to conventional expression-based approaches. Those relationships could then be incorporated into the design of multispecific therapeutics intended to recognize disease-associated cellular environments.
Lesley said the company’s objective is to continue building on the scientific foundation established through its proximity mapping and computational platforms.
Fadeyi similarly highlighted the progression from the original proximity technology to therapeutic programs now entering clinical development as evidence of the potential of proximity biology to unlock new approaches to medicine.
The publication in Nature provides peer-reviewed scientific support for this strategy and establishes a framework for further exploration of proximity-defined disease biology.
As InduPro advances IDP-001 through clinical development and continues developing its discovery platform, the company aims to establish protein proximity as a systematic source of new therapeutic targets. The combination of high-resolution spatial mapping, large-scale datasets, computational modeling and multispecific drug design could allow the company to explore disease biology from a perspective that extends beyond traditional target-expression measurements.
Ultimately, InduPro’s approach seeks to turn the physical organization of proteins on the cell surface into actionable information for drug discovery. The company’s definition of Tumor-Associated Proximity Antigens and the progression of proximity-derived discoveries into clinical-stage programs represent key milestones in that effort, potentially opening new avenues for the development of therapeutics for cancer and autoimmune diseases.
The full research article is available in Nature at the Nature publication.
About InduPro
InduPro, Inc. is a biotechnology company defining and harnessing inherent and induced proximity biology to unlock next-generation therapeutics in cancer and autoimmune diseases. The Company develops therapeutics against novel, tumor-selective proximity-defined antigens and co-target pairs using bispecific antibodies, including antibody-drug conjugates and T-cell engagers, fueling a pipeline of potential first- and best-in-class programs.