A team of UC Santa Barbara engineering and molecular biology graduate students has developed software to accelerate the discovery process for therapies aimed at treating Alzheimer’s and other diseases. By allowing users to design, screen and test new antibodies, the platform reduces the time and cost required to identify promising drug candidates and advance them to clinical trials.
And now they’re launching it by way of their startup, ProFoldBio — one of nearly 70 startups that have emerged from UCSB’s New Venture Program — making the software available to other researchers in industry and academia, and using it themselves to seek out potential therapeutics for Alzheimer’s disease.
The software helps to overcome several issues that arise when studying diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, in which amyloid proteins play a role. Testing potential therapies that act on amyloid proteins typically requires the proteins to be extracted from human tissue. But the tissue can be challenging to obtain and often provides insufficient amyloid protein, “making it really hard to test potential drugs,” said Sam Lobo, chief scientific officer for ProFoldBio, and a recent Ph.D. graduate in chemical engineering …