Proteins.
Invented by nature,
perfected by Scala.
ABOUT SCALA
Scala provides a unique one-shot computational solution to dramatically increase the value and accelerate the development of proteins into commercial products.
We believe that nature holds solutions to some of the biggest challenges facing humanity. The pharmaceutical, chemical and sustainability industries are harnessing nature’s molecular machines — enzymes, antibodies, and other proteins — to generate life-saving drugs and green manufacturing processes. But natural proteins lack the resilience and specificity that modern medicine and industry require.
Our strategy yielded the first one-shot design approaches to be validated across vaccine immunogens, industrial and therapeutic enzymes, therapeutic antibodies, molecular probes, membrane channels, and more.
OUR PLATFORMS
We combine evolutionary analysis, atomistic protein design calculations, and AI to design proteins that exhibit superior properties. Our computational platforms have been rigorously validated in dozens of peer-reviewed publications in leading journals. Scala’s workflows require minimal experimental effort, accelerating and reducing the costs of protein engineering.
Our platforms can be applied to a wide range of problems from therapeutic enzymes, antibodies and vaccines, to the development of industrial enzymes or proteins for foodtech.
01
IMPROVING PROTEIN STABILITY
AND PRODUCTION YIELDS
Most natural proteins are not stable enough for therapeutic or industrial applications. Our platform completely conserves biological activity while dramatically increasing stability, shelf-life and production yields in one shot.
Improve production yields & expression of complex proteins in simple organisms
Increase thermostability
Increase resilience to organic solvents, pH, etc.
Increase shelf life
Reduce aggregation
02
OPTIMIZING ENZYME ACTIVITY
Enzymes can transform chemicals efficiently and sustainably. But many enzymes are not selective or efficient enough for therapeutic and industrial manufacturing applications. Our platform provides a path to quickly and dramatically improve enzyme activity by testing only a small set of designs and without degrading stability.
Improve catalytic activity
03
IMPROVING ANTIBODY STABILITY & HUMANNESS
Increase enzyme specificity
Therapeutic antibodies must exhibit high affinity for their targets, high stability, and closeness to the human germline to avoid provoking undesired immune reaction in patients. Our platform optimizes antibody stability and humanness while retaining the same high affinity for their intended targets.
Humanization
04
STABILIZING MEMBRANE PROTEINS
Stabilization
>50% of drug targets are membrane proteins, but membrane proteins are notoriously difficult to produce in large amounts for drugs screening and structural analysis. Our platform optimizes membrane protein production yields and expression without hampering their activity.
Improve expression & thermostability
OUR SCIENCE
Representative peer-reviewed scientific papers that used our academic methods to design superior enzymes, antibodies, and vaccine immunogens.
Campeotto et Goldenzweig et al. PNAS (2017)
Design of a Malaria Vaccine
Vaccine immunogens for the developing world must be produced in hundreds of millions of doses and withstand extended periods without refrigeration. RH5, The leading candidate to serve as a vaccine for the malaria parasite’s blood stage, can only be produced in expensive insect cells and breaks down at 40 oC. A designed version of RH5 increased stability beyond 50 oC and could be expressed in E. coli while completely retaining the protein’s ability to provoke a protective immune response in animals. This stable and economical vaccine variant has entered Phase II clinical trials in West Africa.
Sherkhanov et al. Nat Commun (2020)
Enzymes for Biofuel Production
Enzymes for industrial manufacturing must often withstand high concentrations of organic solvents that denature marginally stable proteins. An enzyme for biofuel production was designed to improve its half-life in the presence of isobutanol by >1,400 fold relative to the natural enzyme, retaining high activity levels for more then five days instead of several minutes for the wild type enzyme.
Bengel et al. Angewandte Chemie (2020)
Selective Synthesis of Active Pharmaceuticals Ingredients
In medicinal chemistry, specific alkylation reactions are critical for accurate synthesis of numerous molecules. Starting from a non-selective methyltransferase, a set of 50 designs was shown to produce methylated, ethylated, and propylated pyrazols at unprecedented >99% regioselectivity. Such enzymes can provide stepping stones towards the enzymatic synthesis of APIs, leading to purer, more economical, and environmentally sustainable medicine production.
Tennenhouse et al. Nat. Biomed. Eng. (2023)
Therapeutic Antibody Engineering
Using our platform, several unrelated antibodies that originated from mice were humanized through one-shot design calculations. In all cases, the designs were within the humanness range seen in antibodies in the clinic. Furthermore, they exhibited exactly the same high affinity for their intended targets as the mouse source antibodies and in some cases improved stability and production yields.
Dr. Adi Goldenzweig
Co Founder & CTO
Creative Strategist
THE FOUNDING TEAM
Dr. Ravit Netzer
Co-founder & CEO
Dr. Adi Goldenzweig
Co-founder & CTO
Chief Scientist
Prof. Sarel Fleishman
Our founding team has over a decade of experience developing cutting-edge protein design methods.
We established Scala to elevate protein design to the scale and reliability that are needed by the biotechnology and biopharmaceutical industries.
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