BioCentury
ARTICLE | Emerging Company Profile

A-Alpha Bio retools yeast mating for high throughput drug discovery

A-Alpha’s screening tech exploits yeast mating to optimize biologics, modulate protein-protein interactions

August 16, 2019 8:59 PM UTC

A-Alpha Bio is co-opting yeast mating to scale up screening of candidates that create or block protein-protein interactions. The University of Washington spinout is partnering with drug developers to find biologics with defined specificity profiles, small molecule “molecular glues” for targeted protein degradation and agents that disrupt protein complexes.

“Protein-protein interactions govern just about every process in biology,” said A-Alpha Bio Inc. CEO David Younger. “If you know how to disrupt them, enhance them or design new ones, that becomes an incredibly powerful tool for developing effective therapeutics.”...