BioCentury
ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

Ciblex: The export business

June 1, 1998 7:00 AM UTC

The secretion of proteins by enclosed intracellular vesicles that eventually fuse with the cell surface and release their contents is a fundamental process of cell biology. In disease states ranging from cancer to cardiovascular disease to bacterial infections, the ability to stop specific disease-causing proteins from being released would be of great therapeutic benefit.

Unfortunately, so many proteins traverse the vesicular secretory pathway that interfering with their release would be like shutting down the entire Postal Service to prevent a single letter from reaching its destination. However, it recently has become clear that a small subset of disease-causing proteins are exported from cells by a nonvesicular pathway...