Nabla Bio Secures $26M Series A Financing and Collaborations with AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb and Takeda for Generative Protein Design
May 14 2024 - 4:30PM
Business Wire
➢ Company builds integrated AI and wet lab
technologies to design developable, selective, and functionally
active protein drugs against multipass membrane protein targets
➢ Radical Ventures leads new investment in
Nabla Bio as company secures strategic pharmaceutical
collaborations worth more than $550M total
Nabla Bio (aka “Nabla”), pioneers in generative protein design,
today announced the close of a $26 million Series A financing, led
by Radical Ventures with participation from all existing investors,
and strategic collaborations with AstraZeneca, Bristol Myers Squibb
Company and Takeda, worth more than $550 million in upfront and
milestone payments, plus royalties.
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Nabla Bio Co-Founders Surge Biswas and
Frances Anastassacos at the company's labs in Cambridge, Mass.
(Photo: Business Wire)
Nabla develops integrated AI and wet-lab technologies that
enable atomically precise drug design and high-throughput
measurement of drug function, with an initial focus on antibodies
targeting multipass membrane proteins, including for example, G
protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), ion channels, and
transporters.
“We are unlocking new opportunities to build highly selective
drugs against validated, but hard-to-drug targets with a degree of
structural precision not previously possible,” said Nabla
Co-Founder and CEO Surge Biswas. “We are excited to welcome Radical
Ventures as our newest investor and to announce collaborations with
three of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies to help us
bring our work closer to patients.”
Today, nearly all approved protein drugs are focused on soluble,
extracellular targets, for which traditional brute force drug
discovery technologies can yield antibodies with comparative ease.
On the other hand, multipass membrane proteins are far more
challenging to drug, due to their membrane-integrated nature,
limited extracellular availability, conformational dynamics, and
structural similarity across targets.
Given multipass membrane targets comprise two-thirds of all cell
surface proteins and their central and varied involvement in
controlling cell behavior, these targets have long been the “holy
grail” of protein drug development. Nabla’s generative protein
design platform is unlocking hundreds of these previously
inaccessible targets by enabling the precise design of
conformation- and target-selective antibody binders.
“With the technologies we’re developing, we could double the
number of disease-relevant drug targets the industry goes after,”
said Nabla Co-Founder Frances Anastassacos. “That’s an untapped
therapeutic opportunity and why several leading pharmaceutical
companies have collaborated with us.”
"We're excited to be working with Nabla and using their
generative antibody design and high throughput screening
capabilities with the aim to design new drug candidates against
challenging targets,” said Puja Sapra, Senior Vice President of
Biologics Engineering and Oncology Targeted Delivery,
AstraZeneca.
To maximize the patient impact of its platform, Nabla
collaborates with leading pharmaceutical companies with a track
record of successful drug development to expand their pipelines
with high-quality drug candidates against some of the most
challenging, high-impact targets. These collaborations also offer
valuable insights into disease biology and platform development
while offsetting a significant portion of R&D expense, enabling
Nabla to grow quickly and sustainably.
Across its collaborations, Nabla has demonstrated the broad
applicability of its platform, beyond drug design for multipass
membrane proteins. This includes, for example, the design of novel
cytokines, complex multi-domain antibodies, and receptor traps with
greater in vitro activity and developability than leading drugs on
the market. These results are an important step in translating
generative protein design to clinical therapies and evidence of
Nabla’s expanding capabilities.
"Generative AI and large language models are poised to master
the language of proteins in the same way that they have mastered
natural language in recent years, with profound implications for
medicine," said Radical Ventures Partner Rob Toews. "The
world-class team at Nabla Bio helped pioneer this field. Their
groundbreaking work on multipass membrane protein targets offers to
revolutionize antibody therapeutics and has won them major
commercial partnerships with several of the world’s largest
pharmaceutical companies. We are thrilled to lead Nabla’s Series
A.”
Nabla Bio launched in December 2021 with funding from Khosla
Ventures and Zetta Venture Partners, to apply cutting-edge
generative models to the design of protein-based therapies. The
company builds on co-founder Surge Biswas’ work on the first
protein language models published in a series of Nature Methods and
Nature Biotechnology papers (2019, 2021, 2022) alongside colleagues
in George Church’s Harvard Lab, which helped establish the field.
Frances Anastassacos co-founded Nabla after working in biotech
venture capital and completing her PhD at Harvard.
About Nabla Bio
Nabla Bio develops AI and wet-lab technologies that enable the
rational design of developable, selective, and functional drugs
against previously undruggable targets. Since launching in 2021 the
company has raised $37 million with the backing of leading
investors, including Radical Ventures, Khosla Ventures and Zetta
Venture Partners. The company is headquartered in Cambridge, Mass.
and continues to hire top machine learning and synthetic biology
talent. For more information visit nabla.bio.
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version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20240514763517/en/
Media: Amanda Guisbond Intersection: Health
amanda@nabla.bio