Finding New Targets on the Surface of Misfolded Proteins

What It Covers

Faraz Chowdhury, cofounder and CEO of Immunoscientific, explains how the company's AI-enabled structural surfaceomics platform identifies disease-specific protein conformations to create cancer therapies with selectivity ratios exceeding 1,000-to-1, targeting AML as its lead program with an IND planned for 2027.

Key Questions Answered

• •Toxicity as root cause: Approximately one-third of all clinical drug failures stem from toxicity and safety issues, a rate that worsens in oncology where potent drugs cannot distinguish cancer cells from healthy tissue. Recognizing toxicity as a targeting problem—not a chemistry problem—reframes where drug developers should intervene: upstream at target selection, not downstream in dose management.
• •Conformational targeting vs. sequence targeting: Proteins in tumor microenvironments undergo stress-induced structural changes—misfolding, altered glycosylation, mutations—that expose epitopes hidden in healthy cells. By mapping these disease-specific conformations rather than protein sequences, developers can design antibodies that bind exclusively to the malignant form, achieving selectivity ratios of 1,000-to-1 or greater versus conventional approaches.
• •Crowded target landscape: A McKinsey study found an average of nine drug assets in development per cancer target, signaling severe overcrowding around sequence-defined proteins. Structural surfaceomics opens previously invisible target space by characterizing proteins in living cells without purification, enabling analysis of multipass membrane proteins and other targets historically labeled undruggable due to absent binding pockets.
• •Failed asset rescue potential: Many discontinued drug programs failed not because the biology was wrong, but because antibodies bound to epitopes present in healthy tissue. Redesigning those molecules to bind disease-specific conformational epitopes on the same protein could salvage otherwise promising programs, representing a large pipeline of redeemable assets without requiring new target identification from scratch.
• •Hybrid business model for capital efficiency: Immunoscientific generated sufficient revenue from analytical partnerships with eight of the top ten global pharma companies to achieve profitability before raising its $8M seed round—which was oversubscribed after initially targeting $5M. This services-to-therapeutics model validates the platform commercially, builds pharma relationships, and extends runway without relying solely on equity financing.