Archon emerges from stealth with $20M and 'antibody cages' to power up drug development
Archon Biosciences, a biotech startup putting AI to work designing novel biomolecules, has just emerged from stealth with an impressive $20 million
Archon Biosciences, a biotech startup putting AI to work designing novel biomolecules, has just emerged from stealth with an impressive $20 million in seed funding. The company aims to supercharge antibody treatments using specially designed protein “cages” that multiply their effects, opening up new opportunities in drug development.
This is the first company to be spun out of Baker Lab, the University of Washington research outfit overseen by pioneering computational biologist and recent Nobel Prize winner David Baker. His team’s work on generative protein design using AI and other means has been foundational in the fast-evolving industry, and Archon is taking a specific aspect of it to market.
One shortcoming of antibody treatments (and research into effective treatments) is that, like all molecular biology, the process depends a bit on chance. It’s difficult to control how much an antibody or protein actually binds to its target on a cell or other surface.
What Archon’s antibody cages, or AbCs, do (as documented in this paper published in Science) is offer a scaffold for modifying and multiplying their effectiveness. A free-floating antibody may have only a small chance of binding to a target protein, but if you were to stick a dozen of them together in a big dodecahedron, that significantly and perhaps profoundly improves that chance.
This may be the difference between being able to tell if a medication works or not.
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