Excited to share Nabla Bio is collaborating with 3 of the largest pharma companies in the world to use integrated AI & wet-lab tech to design antibodies to some of the most challenging and underserved targets. Thrilled to also add Radical Ventures to the Nabla family, who led our $26M Series A. Press release: https://bit.ly/4dDk4lP
So far, AI in drug design hasn’t had the greatest track record. Earlier this week, this article from Derek Lowe talked about how most targets people are going after with AI are not particularly new, and maybe made incrementally easier to drug with AI. http://bit.ly/3QNo6OF
As an industry, we should instead be asking what are the actual problems in drug development where AI could force a seachange?
At Nabla, we believe multipass membrane proteins are the most compelling opportunity. These complex targets account for over 2/3 of all cell surface receptors, but are the focus of <10% of drug development effort today. Why?
The reason is drugging these receptors requires an exceptionally high-degree of atomic precision, which traditional discovery can’t do, but generative modeling can!
At Nabla, we’re advancing these techniques to improve their atomic accuracy, and increase the rate at which we can obtain target and conformation selective antibodies.
At the same time, we don’t believe AI will be enough. The training data we have for AI are devoid of the larger biological context of the cell, tissues, and the entire organism the drug must function in. So, it’s critical we couple AI to human-relevant measurements of drug performance. Pushing our wet lab in this direction is the other arm of R&D at Nabla.
If we succeed, we double the number of disease-relevant targets the industry can go after. Many of these targets need more study and research, but the molecules being built at Nabla can be used to facilitate this target discovery too!
Surge Biswas will be giving a podium talk at PEGS Boston (https://bit.ly/4dG1SYD) tomorrow sharing some promising results in opening up these difficult targets. Check it out-
Since the beginning of Nabla, we've believed that building new technology is the only way to solve these hard drug design problems. New technology is best built by intense, small, highly technical teams & this is a core element of our culture. That said, between our partnerships and research we have too much to do :P - we're hiring! (nabla.bio/careers)
Last thing; Nabla is a technology company and we are taking a different bet to most other biotechs. We believe being partner-focused and working with expert drug developers will maximize the patient impact of our platform. Revenue and insights from these collaborations are helping us grow more sustainably and build focused technology to solve real problems in drug design.
Thanks to Zetta Venture Partners, Khosla Ventures, Fifty Years, Cantos, Boom Capital, Y Combinator for doubling down this round and continuing to believe in the mission! Onwards / back to work.
