Unleashing the power of collaboration: A-Alpha Bio and Amgen expand partnership to advance molecular glue discovery

A-Alpha Bio and Amgen have announced an expansion of their collaboration to enable the rational discovery of molecular glues, which could be used to degrade disease-related proteins.

Our team invested early in A-Alpha Bio, a company that has built a computational and experimental platform to discover, predict, and engineer how proteins interact with other proteins.

The platform could solve a huge variety of biological challenges, because proteins are the main workhorse of cells.

One of these challenges is how to remove problematic proteins in diseases such as cancer, inflammatory and immune diseases, and infections. 

A-Alpha Bio discovered several weak interactions between targets selected by Amgen and a panel of E3 ubiquitin ligases – enzymes that regulate protein degradation. Based on these findings, Amgen and A-Alpha Bio have expanded their partnership to advance the rational design of molecular glue degraders. 

The collaboration between A-Alpha Bio and Amgen demonstrates the power of combining synthetic biology and machine learning to tackle some of the most challenging problems in biotechnology.