Cyrus CTO Javier Castellanos featured in Chile Global

Cyrus’s CTO Javier Castellanos was featured in a story on Chile Global, the website of a Chilean entrepeneur’s group focused on connecting Chileans who are making a big impact abroad with their home country. The article describes Javier’s path from being a Biochemistry undergrad in Chile to co-founding Cyrus Biotechnology. It focuses on the key role his work in Prof. David Baker’s lab played in growing Javier’s interest in protein design, and how Cyrus was conceptualized as a mission to bring more powerful tools to users outside of academia. The full article is below, and is in Spanish, but Google Translate does a decent job of translating it automatically.

http://www.chileglobal.net/doctor-javier-castellanos-estamos-tratando-de-abrir-un-mercado-de-medicamentos-que-hoy-en-dia-no-existe/

Designing cyclic peptides! Congrats UW IPD, Cyrus Co-Founders Yifan Song & David Baker

Scientists in the UW IPD and David Baker’s lab there have been designing mini-proteins up to 120 residues over the last few years, in a slew of exciting research papers in protein design. Now for the first time they’ve designed short cyclic peptides in the range 18-47 residues — constrained for example by N to C terminal cyclization. Cyclic peptides in nature have evolved into a wide variety of binding modalities, and they are therefore of great interest as drug candidates. Twelve cyclic peptides are designed and have their structures confirmed by experimental methods in this tour de force manuscript. Cyrus co-founder Yifan Song is a co-author on this combined computational and wet lab work.

Read the original article at Nature’s website:

http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nature19791.html