Alphabody

Alphabodies are being developed by the Belgian biotechnology company Complix N.V. as potential new pharmaceutical drugs against cancer and autoimmune disease.

[3] Alphabodies are developed as scaffolds with a set of amino acid residues that can be modified to bind protein targets, while maintaining correct folding and thermostability.

The standard Alphabody scaffold contains three α-helices, composed of four heptad repeats (stretches of 7 residues) each, connected via glycine/serine-rich linkers.

[5] Specific residues on the A and C helices can be modified to bind targets, but only variants that retain thermostability are used for further research.

[6] They also make the molecule stable enough to allow modification of residues on the scaffold itself – rather than only loop regions – increasing the possible variations and target selectivity.

Alphabody CMPX-1023 has been successfully developed to target the p19 subunit of Interleukin 23 (IL-23) and has entered preclinical trials as of October 2011.

According to a 2012 article, Complix has had a degree of success in doing so: "These results show that Alphabodies can be designed to efficiently enter human cells and bind to targets of interest, allowing them to modulate intracellular protein-to-protein interactions and induce apoptosis in cancer cells.

"[9] The research on IL-23-specific Alphabodies was supported by grants from IWT-O&O, Ghent University, and the Hercules foundation (Belgium).