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Protagonist Therapeutics is a biotechnology company pursuing the discovery and development of target oral peptides as well differentiated alternatives to antibodies, and also as new chemical entities (NCEs) against those targets and life threatening diseases for which suitable small molecule and/or biologic options are not available. Peptides typically suffer from limitations of poor proteolytic stability and therefore find scarce therapeutic utility that is largely limited to ‘injectable drugs’. Protagonist’s technology platform is aimed at overcoming these restrictions and expanding the scope of peptide therapeutics to address unmet needs. Specific emphasis is placed on identifying ‘orally stable’ scaffolds and/or engineering oral stability characteristics onto them. The platform has been optimized over the years and involves synergistic integration of rational drug design, diversity oriented computational tools, phage display libraries, recombinant peptide expression, ex vivo oral stability methods, and peptide/medicinal chemistry techniques. This activity has led to the identification of ‘privileged scaffolds’ with favorable oral stability characteristics. Furthermore, the technology platform is well suited both for de novo discovery against a target and optimization around a given chemical starting point.
Appia Bio is an early stage biotechnology company based in Los Angeles, California. Founded in 2020, Appia Bio is focused on discovering and developing engineered allogeneic cell therapies across a broad array of indications with a scalable technology platform that increases access for patients. With its ACUA (Appia Cells Utilized for Allogeneic) technology platform, Appia Bio leverages the biology of lymphocyte development with chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) and T-cell receptor (TCR) gene engineering to generate CAR-engineered invariant natural killer T (CAR-iNKT) cell subtypes from hematopoietic stem cells (HSCs).
Cleveland Diagnostics is developing a breakthrough technology to discover a new class of diagnostics tests with high sensitivity and specificity for many cancers – early on, when cancer is still curable.
EMD Biosciences is a San Diego, CA-based company in the Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, and Biotech sector.
Arresto BioSciences is a Palo Alto, CA-based company in the Healthcare, Pharmaceuticals, & Biotech sector.