Grove Biopharma

As much as they’d like to use protein-sized drugs to interrupt or modulate protein-protein inter­ac­tions inside cells, drug researchers have long been stymied by the difficulty of getting these big molecules through the cell membrane and by the proteolytic enzymes that try to break them down once they’re inside. Grove Biopharma has designed a new category of brush-like synthetic molecules called precision-linked proteomimetics that solve both of those problems. They unfold to slip through the membrane and then fold up again inside a cell for defense against proteolysis. The bristles on the brush are peptides that can bind to specific proteins inside cells and block disease processes — including, in Grove’s vision, those that lead to cancer and any disease that requires modulating a protein interaction or disordered target.