Proteome-Focused ProFound Emerges From Flagship Pioneering
Executive Summary
The company says its platform technology has uncovered “tens of thousands” of previously undiscovered proteins.
ProFound Therapeutics is planning to do a major expansion over the course of the next year as it emerges from Flagship Pioneering. The new firm is exploring a wide variety of proteins to enable novel therapeutics in areas like rare disease, immunology and oncology.
The company made its debut on 26 May with $75m in funding from Flagship Pioneering, where it was founded in 2020, built around the in-house ProFoundry platform and the idea that while the Human Genome Project found only 20,000 protein-coding genes, there is much more to discover in the proteome than what researchers have previously understood.
“That will give us runway to expand the pipeline,” ProFound CEO Avak Kahvejian told Scrip. “We have a lot of hits and leads, but we want to move to declaring development candidates and expanding and building out a pipeline.”
Kahvejian said ProFound currently has 25 employees and plans to expand its staff to about 100 over the next year. He said efforts to build the platform include various activities like molecular technologies, computational tools and wet lab.
“And we’re going to expand from there,” Kahvejian said. “So the team of 25 that has been focused on that is going to grow to include additional translational capabilities to do additional studies in animal models and move towards drug discovery and drug development.”
The start-up is also in some partnering discussions with other Flagship companies around sharing data as well as modalities.
“And then the next phase will be to start exploring opportunities with biopharmaceutical companies that have particular interest and/or expertise in a given therapeutic areas, and I think that’ll be really synergistic as well,” Kahvejian added.
He said that ProFound is similar to other companies born in Flagship Pioneering in that it is a platform company and has a broad technological and application orientation. The idea is to work on aspects of the proteome that remain undiscovered.
“What makes this company distinct from others in the space is that number one, we're focused on the proteome, which is the compendium of human proteins, and mining it for therapeutic purposes to become a fully integrated biopharmaceutical company,” Kahvejian said. “The other aspect is that we’re using technologies and integrating technologies that have never before been integrated together in a biotechnology company and looking at all aspects of genomics, transcriptomics, ‘translate-omics’ and proteomics, combined with additionally high-throughput functional assays and functional discovery tools.”
The company said that to date, it has used ProFoundry to identify tens of thousands of previously undiscovered proteins that could yield a large number of therapeutic targets. Kahvejian said he “wouldn’t be doing it justice” if he tried to name specific disease states that the company is targeting, but added that ProFound is “agnostic” and that the data are “pointing us to a wide array of places.”
“We think there are opportunities in rare diseases, in immunology, in oncology, but we’re also interested in metabolic diseases and other conditions,” he said. “Anywhere a protein can play a role, we will be exploring.”
The conventional wisdom is that there about 20,000 proteins that make up the human proteome, with about 600 playing a role in cancers, for example. (Also see "Scrip’s Rough Guide To Targeted Protein Degradation" - Scrip, 28 Feb, 2022.) Some in the biopharma industry have said “omics” – which includes proteomics as well as genomics, metabolomics and metagenomics – have the potential to transform the industry, but many of the new proteins identified as relevant to disease have been tough to drug using traditional drug discovery and development. (Also see "Scrip Asks...What Does 2022 Hold For Biopharma? Part 3: Technology And Science" - Scrip, 17 Feb, 2022.)
There is also the prospect of finding proteins that can be used as therapies themselves.
“Think of the early days of the biotechnology industry, where human proteins served as the inspiration for the therapy itself,” he said, pointing to erythropoietin and insulin as examples. “Those were actually human proteins and/or mammalian proteins that were identified in nature and then used in cases where the human body was lacking in the protein in certain individuals.”
“And so there are diseases where that’s going to be the case, and we think this new proteome will have multiple examples that we could pursue,” he added.