Geneticist and Harvard Prof. George Church/Rick Friedman/Getty Images
manifold bio launched Thursday with a $40 million Series A financing round led by Triatomic Capital. The size of the investment is relatively small, but the company’s focus and pedigree – it was founded by George Church, Ph.D., known by many as the “Founding Father of Genomics” – is likely to garner attention.
The financing included new investors Section 32, FPV Ventures, Horizons Ventures and Tencent. Existing investors participated, including Playground Global, Fifty Years and FAST by GETTYLAB.
Church is a professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and one of the first to sequence the human genome. He was also fundamental in initiating the Human Genome Project in 1984 and the Personal Genome Project in 2005. The list of biotech companies he has co-founded is lengthy and includes Veritas Genetics, Warp Drive Bio, Alacris, Knome and Pathogenica, to name just a few
“The Best Testing Environment is Reality”
Manifold Bio’s focus, the company says, is to “leverage technological innovation to address key translational bottlenecks in drug creation.” Its technology platform is dubbed “protein barcoding.”
It’s now much easier and faster to create new molecules than it is to test them in a living system. Manifold’s technology would allow 100 compounds to be tested simultaneously. If successful, the tech platform would theoretically make tests in mice 100 more efficient and allow in vivo testing to verify the compound’s function much earlier in the lead generation and preclinical process.
“The best test environment is reality,” Gleb Kuznetsov, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Manifold and a former graduate student of Church’s, said. “But as you get further in a drug development program, you’re investing more and more, to do more and more expensive experiments and work. We’re optimizing much earlier, so once we’re at that final gate of going to clinical tests, we’re moving forward with a drug that has already been optimized. If you can have more conviction that this is the right drug to be investing in, you can address the key risk of your investment.”
Another co-founder is Pierce Ogden, Ph.D., chief scientific officer of Manifold. Ogden was also a graduate student of Church’s. Yet another is Shane Lofgren, head of Business Development, who previously helped build companies out of Stanford and MD Anderson Cancer Center.
Another way to think of Manifold’s technology is as a molecular RFID tag.
“The way it works,” Kuznetsov explained, “is we attach an extra bit of protein, our protein barcode, and that makes the protein trackable and we can track it wherever it goes in a system.” Instead of verifying laboratory tests, “It’s more for informing design. There’s a lot of AI and machine learning driven development, a lot of design on the computer. We focus on a specific cancer target, something on the surface of cancer cells that really flags that this is a cancer cell, and figure out the drug designs that go very specifically to those cancer cells – and don’t go anywhere else.”
Each protein gets a unique and identifiable tag, and equal amounts of 100 molecules are injected into the mouse. Potentially, 95 might do nothing, while three attach to the cancer cells fairly well and two attach very strongly. At that point, researchers can narrow down their focus to two compounds.
The company raised $5.4 million in seed funding in 2020. Using this technology platform, it has launched several internal oncology programs.
Changing the Clinical Risk Equation
“We are using our in vivo design engine in several internal programs while continuing to invest in scaling our platform,” Ogden said. “By making it possible to eventually test thousands of designs simultaneously, we can generate unprecedented data on the in vivo targeting behavior of our drug candidates and significantly change the clinical risk equation.”
As part of the financing round. Jeff Huber, founding partner of Triatomic Capital, will join Manifold’s board of directors. He previously founded and acted as CEO of GRAIL and was co-founder of Google’s life sciences programs.
“Manifold Bio’s platform is the type of paradigm-shifting technology that has the potential to redefine how drug discovery is done,” Huber said. “This exemplifies the power of engineered biology, one of the key pillars of our fund. Combined with the strength of the team and their rapid progress on platform and programs is why we’re excited to partner with Manifold Bio as our first investment.”
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