ROME Therapeutics

Drugging Junk DNA

4 additional undisclosed programs RD oncology

ROME Therapeutics is developing novel therapies for cancer and autoimmune diseases by characterizing the dark genome. The dark genome refers to the 98% of the human genome that does not code for protein and instead consists of repetitive elements such as ancient retroviral elements. While in healthy cells these viral repeats are silenced, evidence shows their activation in diseased or injured cells. ROME is developing therapies that can prevent this activation to reduce inflammation observed in disease. Their lead program is an inhibitor of LINE-1 reverse transcriptase, a protein that is expressed when these viral elements get activated. This program is in early clinical development for skin diseases such as dermatomyositis.