{"id":3024,"date":"2026-06-23T15:35:38","date_gmt":"2026-06-23T15:35:38","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/americanvoiceofhealth.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/23\/finding-ways-to-drug-the-undruggable-diseases\/"},"modified":"2026-06-23T15:35:38","modified_gmt":"2026-06-23T15:35:38","slug":"finding-ways-to-drug-the-undruggable-diseases","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/americanvoiceofhealth.com\/index.php\/2026\/06\/23\/finding-ways-to-drug-the-undruggable-diseases\/","title":{"rendered":"Finding ways to \u2018drug the undruggable\u2019 diseases"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Greg Verdine.<\/p>\n<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

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\n\t\t\tHealth\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n

\n\t\tFinding ways to \u2018drug the undruggable\u2019 diseases\t<\/h1>\n

\n\t\t\tGreg Verdine, a force behind pancreatic cancer progress, learned from a devastating family accident the value of improvisational thinking\t\t<\/p>\n

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\n\t\tSy Boles\t<\/p>\n

\n\t\t\tHarvard Staff Writer\t\t<\/p>\n<\/p><\/address>\n<\/p><\/div>\n

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\n\t\t\t6 min read\t\t<\/span>\n\t<\/div>\n<\/p><\/div>\n<\/header>\n

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\t\t\t\t\t<\/span>
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\n\t\t\tPart of the<\/span>
\n\t\t\tProfiles of Progress<\/span>
\n\t\t\t series<\/span>
\n\t\t<\/a><\/p>\n<\/h2><\/div>\n

Chemical biologist Greg Verdine was driving from his North Shore home to his office in Cambridge when he had to pull over to the side of the road.<\/p>\n

Verdine was listening to the podcast \u201cInteresting Times with Ross Douthat.\u201d The guest was former U.S. Sen. Ben Sasse<\/a>, who has metastasized stage 4 pancreatic cancer. Few with the diagnosis survive beyond a year.<\/p>\n

Sasse sounded surprisingly upbeat as he described an experimental drug that had reduced his tumors by 76 percent and helped him beat survival expectations (though not cure him, he noted).<\/p>\n

\u201cI did that,\u201d Verdine, the Erving Professor of Chemistry, emeritus, recalled thinking. \u201cI made that possible.\u201d <\/p>\n

The drug was daraxonrasib, which has garnered attention in recent months for the unprecedented success of its Phase 3 clinical trial. The treatment roughly doubled overall survival time<\/a> from 6.7 months to 13.2 months, a precious increase for patients like Sasse and the estimated 60,000 other Americans who are diagnosed with pancreatic cancer each year.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a chink in the armor of a very difficult cancer,\u201d Verdine said. \u201cWe can get patients six months, and now everyone is talking about how we get from six months to nine months and so on.\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

Daraxonrasib\u2019s success is owed to a kind of molecular glue that can help two proteins adhere when they wouldn\u2019t.<\/p>\n

For decades, conventional wisdom held that KRAS, a protein that is a major driver of cancer in humans, couldn\u2019t be drugged. It took years, but Verdine\u2019s innovative approach to binding proteins ultimately led to the discovery that made this possible.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not the only time one of Verdine\u2019s seeming long-shot ideas turned out to have sticking power. <\/p>\n

Verdine<\/a> made a career \u201cdrugging the undruggable\u201d \u2014 creating not just new medications, but new kinds <\/em>of medication \u2014 both from his lab at Harvard and later at a series of companies he founded, led, and sold.<\/p>\n

One of those companies, Parabilis, is advancing research from Verdine\u2019s Harvard lab with zolucatetide, a first-in-class anti-cancer therapeutic that is also performing well in clinical trials.<\/p>\n

\u201cYou might be familiar with the term \u2018me-too drugs\u2019 in biotech and pharma, where minimal improvements are made to existing therapeutics,\u201d said Curtis Keith, chief scientific officer at Harvard\u2019s Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator, which supported some of Verdine\u2019s early work with funding and business development consulting.<\/p>\n

By contrast, Keith said, \u201cGreg has the rare distinction of having created what are fundamentally new drug modalities. Not many people can say that.\u201d <\/p>\n

Verdine traces his entrepreneurial streak to early lessons after a family tragedy. <\/p>\n

When he was 5, his father, Richard, suffered an accident and was paralyzed from the neck down.\u00a0The event dramatically rearranged life for the blue-collar family in New Jersey\u2019s rural Pine Barrens.<\/p>\n

Beginning at age 7, Verdine began to skip school periodically to help his father with certain projects, like retrofitting a van to accommodate Richard\u2019s wheelchair.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cThere was a lot of improvisation in that, and I didn\u2019t realize it until many years later,\u201d Verdine said. <\/p>\n

As he grew older, Verdine did well in school and was encouraged to pursue higher education. He began as an English major at St. Joseph\u2019s University, but he found a familiar sense of improvisation in the organic chemistry lab and was hooked. <\/p>\n

Verdine liked that he could take molecules apart and put them back together in new ways for his own ends.<\/p>\n

By the time he went to graduate school at Columbia University, he was working at the borderline between chemistry and biology, figuring out the mechanism by which an anticancer drug, mitomycin, interacts with DNA.<\/p>\n

The research would put him on Harvard\u2019s radar, eventually leading to a professorship in 1988. <\/p>\n

Verdine was then beginning to identify a problem in the drug development process that would become his life\u2019s work. <\/p>\n

Science had largely written off most human proteins as \u201cundruggable\u201d for two reasons.<\/p>\n

First, the proteins were located inside a cell, meaning protein therapeutics would have to be small enough to pass through the cell membrane to reach them. Secondly, the proteins lacked the textured edges or \u201csockets\u201d that would allow a drug to bind with them. <\/p>\n

Verdine\u2019s idea was to distill protein therapeutics to their essential elements, the shortest possible chains of amino acids that could accomplish their disease-targeting objectives while still passing through a cell membrane.<\/p>\n

But those tiny amino acid chains were floppy. They needed a sort of chemical \u201cstaple\u201d to hold them in the perfect helical shape to slip through a cellular membrane and then cling to the surface of a protein.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cYou can see how risky that was,\u201d Verdine said. \u201cIt could have all been wrong.\u201d <\/p>\n

It was risky enough that securing federal funding would have been a challenge. Instead, Verdine turned to Harvard\u2019s Blavatnik Biomedical Accelerator, which supports innovative research in its preliminary stages.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The BBA\u2019s Curtis Keith said that projects like Verdine\u2019s sit at the edge of gaining interest from traditional funding mechanisms, and that\u2019s exactly where the BBA can help.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe idea is that within universities, people working on highly innovative science need to be able to get funding. Often the NIH is not there to fund this kind of work, and a small amount of money can go a long way at that stage,\u201d he said. <\/p>\n

Beginning in 2011, the BBA awarded Verdine three grants totaling $450,000. <\/p>\n

\u201cEven relatively modest amounts of money, a few hundred thousand dollars, can make a huge difference at the early stages of developing a technology, de-risking it, showing proof-of-concept data that is then going to attract outside investors to put in much more significant money,\u201d Keith said. <\/p>\n

And it worked. The technique, which Verdine called stapled peptides or helicons, proved versatile at targeting a wide variety of proteins. Verdine spun the technology into a private company, Fog Pharmaceuticals, since renamed Parabilis.<\/p>\n

In November 2025, the FDA granted<\/a> fast-track designation to Parabilis\u2019 leading drug candidate, zolucatetide, for the treatment of patients with desmoid tumors.<\/p>\n

Zolucatetide, which builds on Verdine\u2019s helicon technology, slips inside cells and binds to a protein called beta-catenin. There, it inhibits a chain reaction that activates cancer growth genes \u2014 a chain reaction that drives a wide spectrum of cancer types.<\/p>\n

Until zolucatetide, beta-catenin was considered undruggable.<\/p>\n

A Phase 1 and 2 clinical trial of zolucatetide demonstrated tumor reductions in a remarkable 100 percent of patients with desmoid tumors.<\/p>\n

On June 10 \u2014 Verdine\u2019s birthday \u2014 Parabilis went public, bringing in a record venture-backed biotech haul of $770.5 million for the company to further advance zolucatetide and other therapeutic programs.<\/p>\n

Of the drug, the BBA\u2019s Curtis Keith said, \u201cIt has the potential to become one of the most important therapeutics coming out of Harvard in recent decades.\u201d<\/p>\n

Verdine\u2019s experience with the pancreatic-cancer drug daraxonrasib and zolucatetide has convinced him that improvisational, blue-sky thinking is necessary for the future of medicine.  \u201cWe should be funding crazy stuff, because the crazy stuff is what changes the world,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Greg Verdine. Health Finding ways to \u2018drug the undruggable\u2019 diseases Greg Verdine, a force behind pancreatic cancer progress, learned from a devastating family accident the value of improvisational thinking Sy Boles Harvard Staff Writer June 22, 2026 6 min read Part of the Profiles of Progress series Chemical biologist Greg Verdine was driving from his …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":3025,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"loftocean_post_primary_category":0,"loftocean_post_format_gallery":"","loftocean_post_format_gallery_ids":"","loftocean_post_format_gallery_urls":"","loftocean_post_format_video_id":0,"loftocean_post_format_video_url":"","loftocean_post_format_video_type":"","loftocean_post_format_video":"","loftocean_post_format_audio_type":"","loftocean_post_format_audio_url":"","loftocean_post_format_audio_id":0,"loftocean_post_format_audio":"","loftocean-featured-post":"","loftocean-like-count":0,"loftocean-view-count":16,"tinysalt_single_post_intro_label":"","tinysalt_single_post_intro_description":"","tinysalt_hide_post_featured_image":"","tinysalt_post_featured_media_position":"","tinysalt_single_site_header_source":"","tinysalt_single_custom_site_header":"0","tinysalt_single_custom_sticky_site_header":"0","tinysalt_single_custom_sticky_site_header_style":"sticky-scroll-up","tinysalt_single_site_footer_source":"","tinysalt_single_custom_site_footer":"0","footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-staying-healthy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/americanvoiceofhealth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/americanvoiceofhealth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/americanvoiceofhealth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/americanvoiceofhealth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/americanvoiceofhealth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3024"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/americanvoiceofhealth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3024\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/americanvoiceofhealth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3025"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/americanvoiceofhealth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/americanvoiceofhealth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/americanvoiceofhealth.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}