Flagship Pioneering has invested $50 million in Prologue Medicines, a Cambridge, Massachusetts-based startup developing treatments that take use of the viral proteome.
With an initial emphasis on immunological, cancer, and metabolic indications, the business plans to use the funding to improve its Decoding Evolutionary Logic of Variant Ensembles (DELVE)TM Platform and build a pipeline of medications for a wide variety of disorders.
About Prologue
With the use of its innovative DELVE Platform, Prologue, led by Lovisa Afzelius, Ph.D., MBA, Co-Founder and CEO, hopes to uncover viral proteome-assisted drug development. With the use of high-throughput biology and computation, DELVE continuously mines the viral proteome to identify new viral proteins and their distinctive characteristics, as well as assesses if these proteins have the ability to alter human physiology in order to cure illness.
The platform has a sizable library of viral protein structures stacked with comprehensive information from human proteins that are known to exist, as well as annotations of viral proteins that have not yet been identified but have been predicted using Prologue’s unique computational frameworks.
The business develops improved therapeutic proteins with features, some of which were previously exclusive to viruses, that broaden the functional range of human proteins by utilizing the acquired principles of natural viral evolution.
Prologue is led by Theonie Anastassiadis, Ph.D., Founding President of Prologue and Senior Principal at Flagship Pioneering; Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and Co-Founder and Chairman of the Strategic Oversight Board; and Hozefa Bandukwala, Ph.D., Founding Chief Scientific Officer of the company and Science Partner at Flagship Pioneering, in addition to Afzelius.
