Excellent interview from Mathai Mammen, M.D., Ph.D. ..."80% of proteins are undruggable…. Why are most things undruggable"?
"...there was a time in the late 90s, drugs were found thru phenotypic screening… most targets were Zion channels…as we saw inflection after inflection of data, sequencing data, we find more and more targets coming forward that are intracellular protein interactions, far more complicated to inhibit with small molecules… to do so it needs a covalent handle OR it needs a cavity, hydropic or creatable from a non-existent pocket (cryptic)…it is possible to find something cryptic. What FogPharma has done is to create a kind of motif that we interfere with protein-to-protein interactions. Does nature put large structures inside cells? Yes, viruses do it all day long… they use alpha helices… this is very important… next level of problem is can we use that, but most protein structures want to be something else… fog learned how to stabilize a structure in a alpha helices. These are not easy to construct. Fog has now 100s of ways to stich an alpha helix. This is an entire revolution and now it doesn’t matter what the composition is and allows astronomical diversity in terms of amino acid placement..”
#biotech #fog #proteinengineering #innovation #lifesciences
𝐅𝐫𝐨𝐦 𝐂𝐚𝐥𝐢𝐟𝐨𝐫𝐧𝐢𝐚: Mathai Mammen, M.D., Ph.D. on being back to company building at FogPharma.
He describes how Fog is leveraging the way α-helices mediate interactions with other proteins as an approach to solve the problem of most structures being undruggable.
Full video: https://lnkd.in/gHSVVjZh
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