ALLOX is a techbio company, a spin-off from Barcelona’s Centre for Genomic Regulation (CRG). The company is developing a proprietary platform technology that is able to map and find allosteric sites in disease-relevant proteins. The discovery of these new allosteric sites will pave the way for the design and development of new selective drugs.
The ALLOX platform is based on ‘multidimensional mutagenesis’, an experimental method developed in the lab of Ben Lehner, that allows measuring the activity of as many as 1 million mutant versions of a protein in a single experiment. The method can directly link genetic changes to phenotypical and biophysical measurements, which is unprecedented. This method allows the company to scan through, at the protein sequence level, and identify new allosteric pockets. Different from other methodologies, it is scalable, quick, and cost-efficient. Further, the unprecedented scale of biophysical measurements generated by the experimental ALLOX platform will lay the foundation for developing AI algorithms to expand drug development efforts.
ALLOX’s main focus is currently within oncology, but the platform has the potential to be exploited for many other relevant diseases.