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LabGenius, a trailblazing drug discovery firm harnessing machine learning to unearth novel therapeutic antibodies, has secured £35 million in its Series B financing round. This fresh influx of capital brings the company's total funding to an impressive £58 million.
At the heart of LabGenius' operation lies EVA™—an intelligent robotic platform adept at designing, executing, and, crucially, learning from its experiments. This advanced, automated, closed-loop discovery engine expedites the identification of high-performing antibodies with unconventional designs.
The company leverages its platform to tackle the on-target, off-tumour toxicity dilemma. Therapeutic antibodies bind to surface markers on diseased cells in higher-than-normal quantities. However, a significant challenge arises in solid tumors: specific sub-populations of healthy cells also exhibit these same surface markers.
When a therapeutic antibody cannot distinguish between healthy and diseased cells expressing identical markers, it results in on-target off-tumor killing, a major toxicity issue for many developing therapeutics.
LabGenius' groundbreaking technology employs an active learning strategy known as Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization (MOBO), enabling the efficient co-optimization of antibodies across multiple crucial properties.
In addition to outpacing traditional methods in efficiency, the LabGenius approach is designed to be devoid of human bias, producing high-performing antibodies with innovative designs.
The Series B round was spearheaded by M Ventures, Merck's strategic corporate venture capital arm. It was joined by new investors Octopus Ventures and LG Corp, as well as existing backers Atomico, Kindred Capital, Lux Capital, and Obvious Ventures.
Oliver Hardick of M Ventures and Oliver Sims of Octopus Ventures have joined the Board of Directors, alongside current members Irina Haivas of Atomico, Leila Zegna of Kindred Capital, James Field (CEO), and Edwin Moses (Independent Chair).
Dr Oliver Hardick of M Ventures commented:
"LabGenius' differentiated ML-driven platform enables the rapid co-optimisation of complex multispecific antibodies across both disease-relevant cell-based assays and key developability assays.
The LabGenius approach has the potential to address many of the fundamental challenges faced by antibody engineers."
Dr James Field, Chief Executive Officer of LabGenius, said:
"Being able to engineer complex multispecific antibodies has immense potential value.
I am inspired by the relentless drive that our team has shown in getting us to this important milestone and look forward to working with our investors as we accelerate the development of both our platform and pipeline."
LabGenius will channel the newly raised capital to broaden the capabilities of its platform and advance a proprietary pipeline of multispecific antibodies toward clinical trials. This enhancement of platform capabilities will also pave the way for more extensive strategic partnerships across various therapeutic modalities.
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