Belharra Therapeutics

There are many proteins involved in making people sick, but right now, small-molecule drugs target only a small fraction of them. The San Diego–based start-up Belharra Therapeutics wants to go after a wider swath, focusing on proteins that have never been targeted by a drug. The story of Belharra, which came out of stealth at the beginning of this year, begins with Christopher Parker, a chemist at Scripps Research in California. As a postdoctoral scholar in Benjamin Cravatt’s lab at the same institute, Parker worked to build techniques for discovering pockets on proteins where drugs could bind. Parker continued that work when he started his own lab in 2018. He took the techniques he was working on to his Scripps colleague John Teijaro, an expert in immunology and persistent viral infections, and they had success binding Parker’s chemical probes to pockets on notoriously tricky immune proteins. Parker and Teijaro went