ResQ Biotech is exploiting the common molecular origin of PMDs, i.e., the tendency of certain pathogenic proteins to misfold and form harmful aggregates, so as to develop a common framework for the efficient discovery of anti-PMD therapeutics.

We have generated engineered microbial cells that function as a stand-alone, living discovery platform for putative drugs against PMDs. These modified microbes have been programmed to biosynthesize combinatorial libraries of short, drug-like cyclic peptides & simultaneously screen them to identify chemical rescuers of disease-associated protein misfolding and aggregation. This biotechnology approach offers a number of important advantages:

• It allows the investigation of an extremely large number of test molecules (up to tens of billions), thus, increasing the chances of discovering molecules with the desired properties

• Cyclic peptides are an emerging class of therapeutic molecules that can combine the high specificity and low toxicity of antibodies with the beneficial pharmacokinetics of small molecules

• Our cyclic peptides libraries comprise previously untested molecules, thus yielding new bioactive molecular entities

• Our approach can be generally applied for the discovery of therapeutic leads for potentially every protein misfolding disease

ResQ Biotech applies this innovative approach for hit identification and lead optimization and then performs preclinical development on the most promising compounds.