An Alumni of JLabs San Diego, Lassogen was founded to address unlocking the full potential of lasso peptides as a new therapeutic modality for diagnosing and treating some of the most intractable health challenges. âThe firm is developing a new therapeutic modality based on lasso peptides being programmed to treat difficult diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders. Lasso peptides are naturally produced by bacteria and represent a unique, vast, untapped source of novel molecular diversity for drug discovery and development. The distinctive lasso fold and 3D topology of lasso peptides engender these scaffolds with beneficial properties (protease, low pH, heat stability) and potent biological activity against challenging targets such as G protein-coupled receptors. Lasso peptides also display an increasingly wide range of mechanisms of action, such as intracellular enzyme inhibition, extracellular protein binding, biosynthesis intermediate binding, and cell-surface receptor modulation. Lassogenâs proprietary cutting-edge platform enables high throughput production and optimization of our innovative lasso-based therapeutics. The firm's founding team has developed a genome mining algorithm using machine learning, revealing the extreme prevalence of highly diverse lasso peptides across most bacterial phyla. The firm's first products are targeting GPCRs for immuno-oncology applications. For example, LAS-103 is a potent and selective antagonist of endothelin type B receptor (ETB). Blocking ETB opens up tumors to infiltration of lymphocytes and turns "cold" tumors "hot" in cancers that overexpress ETB. Combinations of LAS-103 with other immunotherapies thus represents a new approach for treating challenging malignancies such as ovarian cancer and triple negative breast cancer. New therapeutic modality based on lasso peptides that are being programmed to treat difficult diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disord
