LabGenius, a London-HQ drug discovery business leading the way in using machine learning to find new therapeutic antibodies, announced the closure of a Series B investment round totaling more than €40.1 million. With this investment, LabGenius has received more than €67.8 million in funding overall.
In addition to existing investors Atomico, Kindred Capital, Lux Capital, and Obvious Ventures, new investors Octopus Ventures and LG Corp led the round. M Ventures is the strategic, corporate venture capital arm of the science and technology company Merck.
LabGenius plans to utilize the funds raised to advance a wholly-owned pipeline of multispecific antibodies toward the clinic and broaden the reach of its ML-driven discovery platform. Expanding upon the accomplishments of recent research cooperation with Sanofi, the enhanced platform functionality will enable more extensive strategic alliances spanning several treatment modalities.
The innovative finding power of LabGenius comes from EVATM, a sophisticated robotic platform that can plan, carry out, and—most importantly—learn from its experiments. This highly automated closed-loop discovery engine quickly finds high-performing antibodies with unusual designs.
The business is leveraging its platform to solve the issue of on-target, off-tumor toxicity for its wholly-owned pipeline. Therapeutic antibodies attach to surface indicators that are present at higher-than-normal concentrations to target sick cells. One problem with this method in the case of solid tumors is that subpopulations of healthy cells frequently display the same surface markers. Therapeutic antibodies will cause on-target off-tumor death if they are unable to distinguish between diseased and healthy cells that display the same surface markers. For many treatments that are still in development, toxicity through this pathway is a major problem.
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It can be difficult to optimize antibodies for tumor selectivity while also taking important aspects like potency, effectiveness, and developability into account. Traditional approaches systematically optimize antibodies for various features of interest. This is an inherently inefficient procedure since enhancing one important attribute alone may cause other important qualities to perform less well. Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization (MOBO), an active learning technique, is used by LabGenius’ cutting-edge technological platform to facilitate the effective co-optimization of antibodies across several crucial parameters. Apart from its higher efficiency compared to traditional techniques, the LabGenius methodology produces high-performing antibodies with non-intuitive designs and is free from human prejudice.
Statements:
Dr. Oliver Hardick of M Ventures added:
“LabGenius’ differentiated ML-driven platform enables the rapid co-optimization of complex multispecific antibodies across both disease-relevant cell-based assays and key developability assays. Many of the basic problems that antibody engineers have might be solved by the LabGenius method. As LabGenius expands its platform and moves closer to the clinic, we are thrilled to lead this fundraising with our fellow investors and work with their outstanding staff.”
LabGenius CEO, Dr. James Field, stated:
“The ability to engineer complex multispecific antibodies has immense potential value. The LabGenius team has been at the forefront of developing EVATM, a discovery platform that can systematically find new, high-performing multispecific antibodies with unconventional designs, for several years. Our team’s unwavering perseverance in reaching this significant milestone has inspired me, and I am excited to collaborate with our investors as we accelerate the development of our platform and pipeline.”
Dr. Edwin Moses, Chairman of the Board and former CEO of Ablynx, said:
“Closing a round of this size and with such high-quality investors is a testament both to the power and potential of the LabGenius platform and also to the quality and dedication of the LabGenius team. We are excited to solve significant unmet medical needs through the development of new medications using our special and potent platform and to do so while honoring all of our stakeholders for their outstanding support.”
