Welcome to today’s Biotech Spotlight, a series featuring companies creating breakthrough technologies and products. Today, we’re looking at Prologue Medicines, a Flagship-backed biotech aiming to use viral proteins to create new drugs.
In focus with: Lovisa Afzelius, co-founder and CEO of Prologue and an origination partner parent company, Flagship Pioneering.
Prologue Medicines’s vision: The preclinical-stage company is harnessing the power of viral proteins to develop a broad pipeline of disease-fighting drugs. Its initial focus is on immunology, oncology, metabolic and neurodegenerative diseases, but the platform could benefit virtually any disease area, the company alleges.
“It's a very universal approach,” Afzelius said.
Why it matters: Companies have used human proteins to create drugs for decades. Therapeutic proteins have become a roughly $400 billion market since the first recombinant protein insulin drug, Humulin, hit the market in 1982. The FDA has since approved hundreds of these drugs and more are in the pipeline to augment or replace flawed or missing proteins that drive disease.
Viral proteins could offer similar potential, and there are vastly more of them, upwards of 6 million, compared with the 20,000 known proteins in the human proteome.
“Viruses affect humans all the time and in doing so, they hijack human proteins and incorporate them into their system machinery,” Afzelius said.
Exploiting this evolutionary tactic may allow people to flip the script on these pathogens, using them to help fight disease. Virus-evolved proteins may not only have the same power to improve health, but other unique and desirable traits that human proteins don’t, which could improve outcomes.
"Our vision is to identify better versions of human proteins and ... interrogating, interacting and modifying human physiology in ways we never [have]."
Lovisa Afzelius
CEO, co-founder, Prologue Medicines
“We saw many times [in past research] that these viral proteins have even more dominant effects on the human physiology than their human protein counterparts,” she said. “Our vision is to identify better versions of human proteins and ways of interrogating, interacting and modifying human physiology in ways we never had the chance or the possibility to do before.”
The rise of technology: Flagship Pioneering, the venture capital company behind more than 100 ventures and 40 companies, including Denali Therapeutics, Foghorn Therapeutics and Sana Biotechnology, created Prologue to mine the viral proteome. The new company came out of stealth in early May, fueled by an initial $50 million commitment.
Prologue’s mission was largely made possible by the advent of new technology, such as AlphaFold, a computational technology that predicts 3D protein structure, and Prologue’s own machine-learning platform, Decoding Evolutionary Logic of Variant Ensembles. Without these tools, searching through millions of viral proteins would take many years in a laboratory, Afzelius said. In addition to pursuing its drugs, the company may offer services to others.
“We're very open to partnering with external parties in other disease areas where it makes sense,” Afzelius said.
The road ahead: Now, the biggest challenge Prologue faces is choosing the path ahead.
“We have a treasure trove of potential targets we can go after,” Afzelius said.
The question from a corporate development perspective is which ones they should pursue for optimal growth. As they establish a clear direction, Afzelius said they are also improving their technology.
“We're constantly feeding [the platform] with experimental data that we generate internally and import from external sources,” Afzelius said. “I think we're very, very alone in doing this in a systematic way.”
