Turning viral proteins into treatments

The human proteome consists of about 20,000 proteins—a paltry number compared with the 6.2 million or so proteins encoded by viruses . Prologue Medicines has plans to harness the largely untapped therapeutic potential of this vast trove of viral proteins. The firm launched May 7 with $50 million from the life sciences investment company Flagship Pioneering. Viruses have a knack for evolving rapidly to regulate complex biological processes. "They do that by conferring unique characteristics and features onto viral proteins," says Theonie Anastassiadis, Prologue's founding president and a senior principal at Flagship. Those features include "potency to a certain target, cell specificity, and immune stability," which are precisely the things that companies optimize when developing new drugs, she adds. Historically, researchers have studied viruses with the aim of preventing them from causing disease, Anastassiadis says. Prologue aims to "flip this dogma on its head" and look for viral proteins that