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Prologue Medicines, a Cambridge, MA-based company advancing therapeutics that leverage the viral proteome, received a $50m investment from Flagship Pioneering.
The company intends to use the funds to advance its Decoding Evolutionary Logic of Variant Ensembles (DELVE)™ Platform to develop a pipeline of medicines for a wide range of diseases, with an initial focus in immunological, oncology and metabolic indications.
Led by Lovisa Afzelius, Ph.D., MBA, Co-Founder and CEO, Prologue aims to unlock viral proteome-assisted drug discovery with its novel DELVE Platform. DELVE combines computation and high-throughput biology to continually mine the 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 a large 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, the company creates enhanced therapeutic proteins programmed to have properties, some previously unique to viruses, that expand the functional boundaries of human proteins.
In addition to Afzelius, Prologue is led by Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and Co-Founder and Chairman of the Strategic Oversight Board of the company, Theonie Anastassiadis, Ph.D., Founding President of Prologue and Senior Principal at Flagship Pioneering, and Hozefa Bandukwala, Ph.D., Founding Chief Scientific Officer of the company and Science Partner at Flagship Pioneering.