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Archon Biosciencesa biotech startup that uses artificial intelligence to design new biomolecules, has just emerged from obscurity with a staggering $20 million in seed funding. The company aims to enhance antibody therapies using specially designed protein “cages” to multiply their effects, opening up new opportunities in drug development.
This is the first company to be spun off from the Becker Lab, the University of Washington research group overseen by pioneering computational biologist W Recent Nobel Prize winner David Becker. His team’s work on generative protein design using AI and other means has been fundamental in the rapidly evolving industry, and Archon is taking a specific aspect of it to market.
One drawback of antibody treatments (and research into effective treatments) is that the process, like all molecular biology, depends a little on chance. It is difficult to control how much an antibody or protein actually binds to its target on a cell or other surface.
What do Archon antibody cages, or AbCs (as documented in… This paper was published in the journal Science) is to provide a scaffold to modify and maximize its effectiveness. A floating antibody may only have a small chance of binding to the target protein, but if you group dozens of them together into a large dodecimal, it improves that chance dramatically and perhaps profoundly.
This may be the difference between being able to tell if a medication is working or not.
“There are many notable cases in which we understand not only the biology of the target, but also why previous attempts to drug the target have failed in the clinic. These key disease vector tools are within reach,” explained James Lazarovitz, co-founder and CEO of Archon, in a press release. “We have developed a proprietary protein design platform combined with rapid in-house manufacturing and testing to revolutionize how biological materials are developed.”
The startup’s protein design platform uses protein creation and simulation tools created at Baker Lab and licensed, and the resulting AbCs can have a variety of effects. And it doesn’t need any exotic manufacturing methods — if you can produce proteins and antibodies on a large scale, you can probably make AbCs, too.
The $20 million round was led by Madrona Ventures with participation from DUMAC Inc., Sahsen Ventures, WRF Capital, Pack Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments, and Cornucopian Capital; This comes in addition to about $7 million in grants provided by a number of institutes and government agencies.
Archon, like the University of Wisconsin and Baker Lab, is based in Seattle. TechCrunch will be visiting soon to learn more about this promising offering and share more of it.
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