On May 7, 2024 Flagship Pioneering, the bioplatform innovation company, reported Prologue Medicines, a company unlocking the therapeutic potential of the viral proteome for the creation of powerful new medicines (Press release, Prologue Medicines, MAY 7, 2024, View Source [SID1234643565]). Flagship has initially committed $50 million to advance the company’s Decoding Evolutionary Logic of Variant Ensembles (DELVE) Platform and harness its power to develop a pipeline of medicines fora wide range of diseases, with an initial focus in immunological, oncology and metabolic indications.
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"We asked, what if we could expand beyond the functional boundaries of the human proteome by harnessing viral evolution," said Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and Co-Founder and Chairman of the Strategic Oversight Board of Prologue. "By exploring the viral proteome, we can discover novel proteins with enhanced or completely unique therapeutic properties to develop medicines for optimal patient outcomes."
Prologue is unlocking viral proteome-assisted drug discovery with its novel DELVE Platform. DELVE combines computation and high-throughput biology to continually mine the expanding viral proteome to uncover viral proteins and their unique features and evaluate their potential to modulate human physiology for the treatment of disease. The platform contains the largest known database of viral protein structures layered both with detailed data from known human proteins and annotations of previously uncharacterized viral proteins predicted through Prologue’s proprietary computational frameworks. By applying the learned rules of natural viral evolution, Prologue creates enhanced therapeutic proteins programmed to have properties, some previously unique to viruses, that expand the functional boundaries of human proteins.
"The viral proteome dwarfs the human proteome by orders of magnitude, enabling us to reveal a trove of powerful new proteins that can be used as medicines across nearly any therapeutic area," said Lovisa Afzelius, Ph.D., MBA, Co-Founder and CEO of Prologue and Origination Partner at Flagship Pioneering. "Nature has evolved proteins with unique characteristics across the viral proteome. Advances in machine learning are enabling us to quickly characterize and select those that can precisely regulate human physiology to create powerful new medicines with impeccable precision."
In addition to Afeyan and Afzelius, Prologue is led by Theonie Anastassiadis, Ph.D., Founding President of Prologue and Senior Principal at Flagship Pioneering, and Hozefa Bandukwala, Ph.D., Founding Chief Scientific Officer of Prologue and Science Partner at Flagship Pioneering.