The key is making it possible to test and quantify mixtures of designs directly where it matters- in vivo disease models. “Now, we’re building the platform technology for the larger space of protein therapeutics. Last year, Ogden published a ground-breaking paper in Science demonstrating in vivo screening of more than 200,000 gene therapy virus designs. “By turning protein engineering into a DNA synthesis and sequencing problem, we’re able to learn biological design principles directly from rich data generated by our novel in vivo assays,” co-founder and CSO Pierce Ogden said. Manifold Bio’s platform will allow multiplexed (pooled) tracking and quantification of thousands of unique protein designs, including monoclonal antibodies and other protein therapeutic scaffolds, across a range of complex testing environments. “With the technology and talented interdisciplinary team we’re building at Manifold Bio, we’ll be able to bring the massively parallel economics of multiplexing to bear on engineering protein therapeutics.” “We’ve seen exponential advances that allow us to synthesize millions of strands of DNA and sequence billions of DNA bases, but the number of drugs that can be tested in relevant animal models remains in the single digits,” said co-founder George Church, who introduced Manifold Bio in a keynote last week at PEGS, the premier industry protein engineering conference. At Manifold Bio, we’re focused on building a platform that removes this barrier and allows us and our partners to pursue cures for devastating diseases much more rapidly.” “Despite the advent of high-throughput technologies early in the discovery pipeline, drug development teams eventually run into the bottleneck of testing only one molecule at a time in the most relevant biological assays and animals. “The most valuable data on a candidate drug comes from testing it in a living system,” says co-founder and CEO Gleb Kuznetsov. They are joined by co-founder and Head of Business Development Shane Lofgren who previously helped build companies that emerged from Stanford and MD Anderson. Manifold Bio was founded by CEO Gleb Kuznetsov, Ph.D., and CSO Pierce Ogden, Ph.D., along with George Church, Ph.D., Professor of Genetics at Harvard Medical School and the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering. The investment will enable the company to expand the team and accelerate the development of a proprietary protein quantitation platform. Playground Global led the round and was joined by pre-seed lead Fifty Years and early investors GETTYLAB and Allston Venture Fund. BOSTON-( BUSINESS WIRE)- Manifold Bio, a spinout from George Church’s lab at Harvard Medical School focused on dramatically increasing the throughput of protein therapeutics testing in vivo, announced today the close of a $5.4 million Series Seed investment round.
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