Sibylla Biotech

Sibylla is an innovative start-up founded in 2017 as a spin-OFF of the INFN (National Institute of Nuclear Physics) and the Trento and Perugia Universities. Its multidisciplinary team of co-founders has developed a pioneering Early Drug Discovery method that applies to the research and design of new drugs, effective against diseases so far incurable. Drug discovery is an extremely complex problem, therefore requiring innovation. Sibylla is a beautiful example of how innovation can be pushed forward by a multidisciplinary and agile team. Sibylla's approach is based on the possibility of simulating the folding pathway from the amino acid sequence as produced by the cells' ribosomes to the native state. Traditional pharmacological methods investigate the target proteins' interaction sites in their native, biologically active state. Novel methods act at the DNA level. Sibylla follows an alternative approach. We identify small molecules that bind to pockets found in the intermediate folding state. These pockets disappear in the native state, and that is why we may try to drug proteins which have been so far considered undruggable. Sibylla technology is called PPI-FIT (Pharmacological Protein Inactivation by Folding Intermediate Targeting). A molecule found through PPI-FIT would impair the folding of the protein, leading it to degradation. The overall effect is a selective reduction of the expression level of the target protein. The medical areas focused on by Sibylla's research include oncology and antibiotic resistance, although the technology can be applied to any therapeutic area. The company is developing a proprietary pipeline of potential drugs. We can also provide co-development or identifying potential drugs for pharmaceutical companies' specific targets. We recently signed a collaboration agreement with an important Pharma company. Besides the promising results already achieved, Sibylla keeps being engaged in developing proprietary computing technology.