Aukera Therapeutics joins BaseLaunch Portfolio

Basel, Switzerland., 15 February 2022 — Aukera Therapeutics is a spin-off from the Biozentrum of the University of Basel, founded by Stefan Imseng and Dritan Liko. The company emerged from the laboratories of Michael Hall – who discovered TOR and made seminal contributions to unravel the biology of the mTOR pathway – and Timm Maier – who focuses on the structural biology of macromolecular complexes and particularly multienzymes and regulatory protein complexes. Deep biological insights on the mTOR pathway combined with state-of-the-art structural biology allowed the teams to unravel the structure-function relationships of mTOR complexes, opening up novel avenues to drug them.

Aukera builds a discovery engine that allows designing new classes of drugs to selectively target different branches of the mTOR pathway. The lead program selectively targets mTOR complex 1 for the treatment of rare diseases, cancer, and neurodegenerative diseases where Aukera’s approach uniquely addresses unmet medical needs.