A Brief Overview of Prosetta’s Research Activities

 

Prosetta Antiviral, Inc is an early stage biotechnology company, founded to explore the potential of CFPSS for drug discovery. More specifically, the possibility that modified CFPSS might allow detection of highly druggable protein-protein interactions that have previously been undetected. Prosetta’s findings to date are summarized below with our investigation of crucial protein-protein interactions in virus cell biology. The capsid (the protein shell that protects the DNA or RNA genome of a virus), has long been believed to be made through self-assembly. CFPSS revealed a pathway by which complex machines of more than a dozen host proteins catalyze capsid formation via discrete assembly intermediates1-4. Variations on the theme of this approach subsequently pursued by Prosetta scientists have allowed discovery of overlapping putative capsid assembly pathways for every family of virus investigated (to date, 17 of the 23 families of viruses known to cause human disease). Each of these previously unknown viral capsid protein-host protein interactions represent novel, potentially druggable, anti-viral targets, different in one fashion or another, for each family of disease-causing virus.