US-based life sciences venture capital firm Flagship Pioneering has created Abiologics, a new company to develop a new type of supranatural and programmable medicines, dubbed Synteins.
Synteins are computationally designed and synthesised using novel building blocks to have superior properties to bring life-changing treatments to patients across different diseases.
The company will initially invest $50m in Abiologics to advance the new platform and develop a diverse pipeline of medicines, primarily focused on oncology and immunology indications.
Flagship Pioneering founder and CEO, and Abiologics strategic oversight board co-founder and chairman Noubar Afeyan said: “Biologics have transformed medicine in the past forty years, but only a fraction of their potential has been realised because we’ve been limited by the boundaries of nature.
“With the convergence of advancements in generative artificial intelligence, automated polymer synthesis and chemical functionalisation coupled with a vision to develop more powerful medicines with unprecedented diversity, we asked, what if we could design biologics entirely from new building blocks that could overcome the most critical limitations of today’s medicines?”
The Abiologics platform comprises fully integrated digital and automated wet-lab infrastructure to create supranatural biologics with powerful, desirable pharmacological properties.
The platform leverages advanced generative AI (GenAI) to computationally design Synteins from scratch, using a wide set of artificial building blocks.
The artificial building blocks comprise biological compounds beyond the 20 naturally occurring amino acids, which form the basis for currently available biologics.
Upon completion of the design part, Abiologics will chemically synthesise its digitally-optimised Synteins using new technologies.
Synteins can be programmed to interact with virtually any therapeutic target while evading the body’s natural defences.
Abiologics is the first to discover, prototype and scale-up polymers composed solely of artificial building blocks by mitigating the limitations of traditional biologics discovery tools.
The company has successfully generated Synteins made entirely of D-amino acids that can bind to different therapeutically relevant targets while being ultrastable.
Flagship Pioneering general partner and Abiologics co-founder and CEO Avak Kahvejian said: “For the first time, we can imagine and generate chemically synthesised biologics at scale and with increasing programmability, offering a new class of medicines with transformative potential.
“Creating protein biologics with artificial building blocks rather than naturally occurring amino acids allows Synteins to go unrecognised by the immune system, offering significant advantages compared to today’s biologics such as less frequent dosing, oral delivery and the ability to reach parts of the body that were previously impossible to access and treat.
“With Synteins, Abiologics is poised to bring boundary-breaking medicines to patients across a range of diseases.”
