THE DARPA DRIVE
Ten years ago, DARPA – the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency – encouraged the creation of a new company to assist in human health monitoring applications and enhance biosensing. When the agency responsible for much of the research that led to the development of the internet comes calling, you answer. And so Design-Zyme became a reality.
“That led to a number of developments, and really our first major patent as a company,” said Peter Petillo, the founder and CEO of Design-Zyme LLC. That first patent – an in vitro glycosylation platform – improves how proteins are modified to function better in medical applications. Proteins often need specific sugars attached to them – a process called glycosylation – for them to work properly. Design-Zyme’s innovation allows for precise control of this process, creating more reliable and effective proteins for use in diagnostics and vaccines.
“It all starts with an unmet medical need,” Petillo said. “We’re a small company. We’re entrepreneurs. So we have to develop medicines – in this case, vaccines – that will actually treat people.”
But behind that goal, the original push from DARPA remains in the company’s DNA. “We’ve always had the DARPA ethos,” said Erik Naylor, Design-Zyme’s chief operations officer. DARPA focuses on ambitions and revolutionary projects to create transformative technologies. “It’s a nanoparticle scaffold where we engineer our Lyme disease vaccine,” Naylor said. “All these things didn’t even exist 10 years ago when I thought about getting in the vaccine field.”
Video: Design-Zyme
Hear more about Design-Zyme in the video spotlight! Hear about its founding, current focus areas, and how safety is built in to every step of their process.
INNOVATE & COLLABORATE
Design-Zyme provides modern solutions for contemporary vaccine challenges. Currently, the team is focused on vaccine solutions in three areas: Lyme disease, chlamydia and xylazine, a tranquilizer appearing in the illegal drug supply that would put the company in the opioid use disorder (OUD) space. “It’s called ‘tranq dope’ because the users are tranquilized,” Petillo said. “At the time we started this work, there were no reports of any effective xylazine vaccine out there. We’ve been fortunate to be funded by Wellcome Leap for that effort.”
These projects are what get the Design-Zyme team out of bed in the morning, ready to head to the lab to discover and innovate. “I think all the work we’re working on is exciting. Our OUD vaccine project has the potential to greatly reduce the harms of the opioid use disorder epidemic here in this country,” said Dwight Deay, the company’s chief scientific officer. “Being exposed to Lyme disease is currently a risk everyone has to take when they go outdoors. And chlamydia has been a problem for humanity for a long time. It would be great if we could get a vaccine that has the potential to eliminate the disease entirely.”
The OUD vaccine isn’t Design-Zyme’s only focus area to earn funding. In October 2024, Petillo and P. Scott Hefty, a professor at the University of Kansas, collaborated on a successful $3 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) award to fund the research and development of a Lyme disease vaccine. The vaccine uses hyaluronic acid as an adjuvant, a substance added to vaccines to help the body create a stronger immune response. It will target multiple strains of the pathogen Borrelia burgdorferi, the primary bacterium that causes the disease.
“What we’re able to do by collaborating with KU and the researchers at KU is to bring in expertise that we don’t have and models that we don’t have here at Design-Zyme. We’re just too small for that,” Petillo said. And the benefits of partnership are a two-way street. “We have an open-door policy with respect to students. We’ve had a number of student interns come through. In fact, Dwight was a student intern when we started the company.”
CUTTING-EDGE SAFETY
Being on the cutting edge of science doesn’t mean much if innovation happens without safety parameters built in, especially when you’re dealing with a vaccine around opioids. “We’ve made design considerations with regard to that vaccine to make sure that not only is the end product safe for users and doesn’t have any risk of opioid-like effects, but also during manufacturing,” said Deay.
Design-Zyme takes safety very seriously, especially because vaccines are involved. “Vaccines are safe. They undergo the same rigorous testing that everything else that’s a drug does and vaccines save lives,” said Petillo. “We emphasize safety at the outset of the design of our vaccines, and that’s actually a critical component to this.”
PERKS OF THE PARK
What started in 2015 in a small lab has grown over the past decade, something that Petillo says the KU Innovation Park team took in stride. Design-Zyme is located at the Park’s west facility, about three miles from the main buildings on Becker Drive. “They allowed us to expand into the basement, and then we needed more expansion space,” he said. “I think more than anything, the management team at the Park has been accommodating.”
With Petillo’s success with SBIR funding opportunities, the Park tapped his knowledge and expertise during a day-long capital raise boot camp last fall. “The efforts to bring performers within the Park together for a number of events has been quite successful,” he said.
