Predicting the Unpredictable Off-Target Activities of Drugs

One of the reasons for the high cost of drug development is that most drugs fail in clinical development. Even though preclinical testing can provide a good insight into whether a drug hits an intended target, once in the body, drugs can interact with a large number of proteins and have unintended consequences. A-Alpha Bio, a spinout from the University of Washington's Institute for Protein Design and Center for Synthetic Biology, is developing a platform that can measure thousands of protein interactions simultaneously and how drugs affect them. We spoke to David Younger, co-founder and CEO of A-Alpha, about the company’s platform, the bottleneck in drug development it is addressing, and the business model it is pursuing.