Foghorn is a clinical stage, precision therapeutics biotechnology company pioneering a new class of medicines that treat serious diseases by correcting abnormal gene expression through selectively targeting the chromatin regulatory system, an untapped opportunity for therapeutic intervention in oncology and with potential in a wide spectrum of other diseases, including immunology and inflammation.
The chromatin regulatory system orchestrates gene expression — the turning on and off of genes — which is fundamental to how all our cells function. The chromatin regulatory system is implicated in approximately 50 percent of all cancers, and understanding how this system works could lead to an entirely new class of precision medicines. To our knowledge, we are the only company with the ability to study and target the chromatin regulatory system at scale, in context, and in an integrated way.
Our proprietary Gene Traffic Control platform provides an integrated and mechanistic understanding of how the various components of the chromatin regulatory system interact, allowing us to identify, validate and potentially drug targets within this system. We have developed unique capabilities that have yielded new insights and scalability in drugging this new, previously untapped and promising area.
At present, we are working on more than seven programs with one clinical-stage drug candidate currently in Phase 1 development. We have discovered highly selective chemical matter for some of the most challenging targets in oncology including SMARCA2 (BRM), CBP, EP300 and ARID1B, as well as other undisclosed targets. We believe our current pipeline has the potential to help more than 500,000 cancer patients. We take a small molecule modality agnostic approach to drugging targets which includes protein degraders, allosteric enzymatic inhibitors, and transcription factor disruptors. We are a biology first company, which means we focus first on the underlying genetics and biology of a disease relevant target and then leverage the most appropriate drugging approach to impact the disease biology.