Seattle biotech closes $18M Series B — and acquires a company; Another George Church alum launches upstart

Seat­tle biotech Cyrus Biotech­nol­o­gy an­nounced this morn­ing that it closed an $18 mil­lion Se­ries B — and land­ed an ac­qui­si­tion to boot.

The biotech, which has an in-house soft­ware pro­gram for bi­o­log­ics dis­cov­ery, ac­quired Or­thog­o­nal Bi­o­log­ics, a spin-out from the Uni­ver­si­ty of Illi­nois that fo­cus­es on us­ing ‘Big Da­ta’ to run deep mu­ta­tion­al scan­ning on pro­teins and re­cep­tors for drug dis­cov­ery.

The fi­nanc­ing in­cludes in­vest­ments from Or­biMed Ad­vi­sors, Trin­i­ty Ven­tures, Agent Cap­i­tal, Yard Ven­tures, among oth­ers. And Se­lec­ta Bio­science, with which Cyrus is al­ready work­ing on au­toim­mu­ni­ty pro­grams, joined as a strate­gic in­vestor.

The plan, for the two com­pa­nies? Merge and move in­to drug dis­cov­ery.

‘We are thrilled to bring to­geth­er a range of ex­pe­ri­enced biotech in­vestors from across the globe to sup­port our move in­to in­de­pen­dent drug dis­cov­ery,’ said Cyrus CEO Lu­cas Nivon.

‘By merg­ing our com­pa­ny with Cyrus, we can cre­ate a uni­fied bi­o­log­ics dis­cov­ery plat­form,’ for­mer Or­thog­o­nal CEO Erik Procko added. — Paul Schloess­er

An­oth­er George Church alum launch­es a biotech start­up — match­ing AI for pro­tein drug de­vel­op­ment

AI re­mains one of the big emerg­ing sec­tors in the bio­phar­ma in­dus­try, as new play­ers con­tin­ue to push to com­pete for what they see as the fu­ture of drug de­vel­op­ment.

To­day it was Surge Biswas’ turn at bat, pick­ing up an $11 mil­lion seed round for a Boston-based start­up called Nabla Bio. Khosla Ven­tures and Zetta Ven­ture Part­ners led the start­up raise, with par­tic­i­pa­tion from Fifty Years, Can­tos Ven­tures and oth­ers.

That mon­ey will be put to use de­vel­op­ing what the biotech calls ‘an AI-first pro­tein de­sign plat­form, en­abling rapid end-to-end en­gi­neer­ing of next-gen­er­a­tion an­ti­body ther­a­peu­tics.’

‘Ther­a­peu­tic an­ti­body de­sign is not just about bind­ing to tar­gets, and in­suf­fi­cient pro­tein en­gi­neer­ing is es­ti­mat­ed to be re­spon­si­ble for a large frac­tion of clin­i­cal tri­al dis­con­tin­u­a­tions and fail­ures, es­pe­cial­ly for large mol­e­cule bi­o­log­ics that will play an in­creas­ing­ly promi­nent role in the clin­ic,’ said Alex Mor­gan, a part­ner at Khosla Ven­tures. ‘As ther­a­peu­tics be­come more com­plex with more func­tion­al do­mains, the role of AI in de­vel­op­ment will be­come crit­i­cal.’ — John Car­roll

Ab­b­Vie’s PhI­II in­duc­tion study reach­es both pri­ma­ry end­points in Crohn’s dis­ease pa­tients

As a drug class, JAK in­hibitors have been rife with con­cerns of safe­ty — but Ab­b­Vie’s lat­est study on JAK in­hibitor upadac­i­tinib, aka Rin­voq, may quell some of those con­cerns.

The phar­ma an­nounced this morn­ing that a Phase III tri­al in pa­tients with Crohn’s dis­ease reached both pri­ma­ry end­points: clin­i­cal re­mis­sion and en­do­scop­ic re­sponse af­ter 12 weeks.

The dou­ble-blind, place­bo-con­trolled tri­al known as U-EX­CEED is the first of two Phase III in­duc­tion stud­ies to eval­u­ate safe­ty and ef­fi­ca­cy of Rin­voq in adults with mod­er­ate to se­vere Crohn’s dis­ease.

Full re­sults from the study will be pre­sent­ed at up­com­ing med­ical con­fer­ences and pub­lished in a peer-re­viewed med­ical jour­nal.

‘I am thrilled to see the re­sults of this first Phase III in­duc­tion study of upadac­i­tinib,’ said Jean-Fred­er­ic Colombel, one of the U-EX­CEED study in­ves­ti­ga­tors and di­rec­tor of the In­flam­ma­to­ry Bow­el Dis­ease Cen­ter at Mount Sinai. — John Car­roll
https://endpts.com/seattle-biotech-closes-18m-series-b-and-acquires-a-company-another-george-church-alum-launches-upstart/