A-Alpha Bio

Measuring protein interactions, thousands at a time

​A-Alpha Bio, Inc. was founded in 2017 as a spinout from the University of Washington's Institute for Protein Design and Center for Synthetic Biology. The company's technology exploits mating between MATa and MATα yeast strains to detect protein-protein interactions. By knocking out the endogenous proteins that bring the two strains together and expressing proteins of interest on cells of each strain, the company can quantitatively conduct high-throughput measurements of pairwise protein-protein interactions. The company is also using the system to find "molecular glue" compounds that recruit E3 ubiquitin ligases to targets of interest in order to tag them for degradation. orologi replica