Software is the key to how to discover therapeutic antibodies today.Founder of Nabra Bio It is said that the next generation of antibodies will be designed rather than discovered, and these designs will be aided by artificial intelligence. A spin-off company of Harvard University has raised $11 million to further develop its technology platform.
The seed financing announced by Nabla on Monday was co-led by Khosla Ventures and Zetta Venture Partners.
Nabla, based in Boston, said current antibody drug research methods are expensive and time-consuming. The start-up company has developed techniques that use artificial intelligence to guide protein modeling and design. Nabla said its high-throughput technology can generate predicted “biophysical fingerprints” of 1 million antibodies in one step. This ability is combined with proprietary methods that adapt to natural language processing algorithms—such as those used in digital assistants such as Alexa and Siri—to understand how nature builds proteins. In addition to reducing the time and cost of antibody development, the method also helps scientists improve the way they design proteins, which in turn increases the chance that these proteins will continue to be successful drugs.
“Therapeutic antibody design is more than just binding to the target. It is estimated that insufficient protein engineering is the cause of the interruption and failure of most clinical trials, especially for macromolecular biologics that will play an increasingly important role in the clinic.” Khosla Venture Capital partner Alex Morgan said in a prepared statement. “As treatments become more and more complex, and more and more functional areas, the role of artificial intelligence in development will become crucial.”
The Nabla technology was developed by the co-founder and CEO Surge Biswas, a student in the laboratory of the famous Harvard geneticist George Church, and the academic co-founder of the startup. According to the records of the Massachusetts company, the company was established last year. According to Dylan Reid, head of Zetta Venture Partners, the startup has five collaborations with large unnamed pharmaceutical and biotech companies. Nabla is located at the Harvard Life Laboratory in Paljuka, a joint workspace of a wet laboratory and Harvard-affiliated life science startups.
Nabla said it will use its new capital to accelerate the development of its technology. Other participants disclosed in the company’s seed round are Fifty Years and Cantos Ventures.
As more and more antibody drugs enter the market, the field of antibody research is developing, and some of these drugs have become blockbusters. Companies that support antibody discovery efforts are also growing. Participants in this field include AbCelera Biologics and Adimab. The Omniab division of Ligand Therapeutics is in the field of antibody discovery. last month, Ligand announced plans to spin off its antibody business into an independent, possibly publicly traded companyIn the company’s presentation in September, Ligand stated that the current market for antibody drugs worth 150 billion U.S. dollars is expected to grow to more than 250 billion U.S. dollars within five years.
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