Indel: Vive la difference

Bacterial proteins that have close homologs in humans have largely been ignored as drug targets due to safety concerns. Indel Therapeutics Inc. thinks it has a way to safely target these proteins, opening up a new field of targets for infectious diseases. The company is starting with drug-resistant bacteria.

The Indel platform technology, which it licensed out of the University of British Columbia, identifies specific amino acid sequences that differ between the human and bacterial versions of a protein, called insertion/deletion (indel) differences. The company believes that targeting indels could allow for therapeutic activity against the bacterial version without unwanted side effects in humans...