Flagship Pioneering Unveils Prologue Medicines to Unlock the Therapeutic Potential of the Viral Proteome
07 Mayo 2024 - 5:00AM
Business Wire
The company’s DELVE™ Platform combines
computation and high-throughput biology to systematically discover
the therapeutic potential of proteins tuned through millennia of
viral evolution
The company emerges after three years of
platform development with an initial commitment of $50 million from
Flagship Pioneering
Flagship Pioneering, the bioplatform innovation company, today
unveiled Prologue Medicines, a company unlocking the therapeutic
potential of the viral proteome for the creation of powerful new
medicines. 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 for a wide range of diseases, with an initial focus in
immunological, oncology and metabolic indications.
"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.
About Prologue Medicines Prologue is designing powerful
new medicines by unlocking the viral proteome. The company’s
state-of-the-art DELVE™ Platform systematically identifies and
evaluates viral proteins and their unique features for their
potential to precisely regulate human physiology. By co-opting
viral evolution, Prologue is expanding the functional boundaries of
proteins encoded by the human genome to create new programmable
medicines. Prologue was founded by Flagship Pioneering in 2021.
About Flagship Pioneering Flagship Pioneering is a
biotechnology company that invents and builds platform companies,
each with the potential for multiple products that transform human
health or sustainability. Since its launch in 2000, Flagship has
originated and fostered more than 100 scientific ventures,
resulting in more than $70 billion in aggregate value. To date,
Flagship has deployed over $3.7 billion in capital toward the
founding and growth of its pioneering companies alongside more than
$28 billion of follow-on investments from other institutions. The
current Flagship ecosystem comprises over 40 companies, including
Denali Therapeutics (NASDAQ: DNLI), Foghorn Therapeutics (NASDAQ:
FHTX), Generate:Biomedicines, Inari, Indigo Agriculture, Moderna
(NASDAQ: MRNA), Omega Therapeutics (NASDAQ: OMGA), Sana
Biotechnology (NASDAQ: SANA), Seres Therapeutics (NASDAQ: MCRB) and
Tessera Therapeutics.
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