David Baker, head of Seattle’s Institute for Protein Design, launches London biotech startup
Prolific biotech co-founder and College of Washington scientist David Baker, head of the UW Institute for Protein Design, has launched a brand new firm.
Attraction Therapeutics, primarily based in London, harnesses deep studying to uncover new compounds towards targets for most cancers and different therapeutic areas. The corporate this week introduced $50 million in Collection A financing.
Baker is a scientific co-founder together with CEO Laksh Aithani, beforehand a machine studying engineer at drug discovery firm Exscientia and founding father of Genei, one other computationally-powered biotech firm.
Attraction Therapeutics’ deep studying platform, DragonFold, was developed by Baker and Aithani, in accordance with an announcement asserting the launch of the brand new firm Thursday.
DragonFold is designed to seek out new small molecule therapeutics towards protein targets. Such small molecules have the potential to intervene with proteins within the physique that management all the pieces from cell division to cell progress.
The software can predict the co-crystal construction of a protein certain to a small molecule. And as enter it wants solely the chemical construction of the small molecule and the sequence of the protein.
Baker’s 100-person lab on the UW has been the supply of a number of protein design spinouts primarily based in Seattle. Baker has beforehand co-founded 9 corporations and advises 18 others, in accordance with IPD’s web site.
IPD spinouts embrace Neoleukin Therapeutics, whose fully-engineered compound for strong tumors is in early scientific trials; Cyrus Biotechnology, which companions with different biopharma corporations to design medicine, and vaccine firm Icosavax, which raised $180 million in its IPO final summer time.
Final winter, IPD’s deep studying software RoseTTAFold, developed by Minkyung Baek and her colleagues, took residence Science journal’s Breakthrough of the 12 months award. That software and one other by Alphabet’s DeepMind, shocked scientists with their velocity and accuracy at predicting how proteins fold into three dimensions.
However DragonFold is a very totally different mannequin than both RoseTTAFold or DeepMind’s software, Aithani advised Endpoints Information.
Baker’s spinouts be a part of a rising record of biotech corporations leveraging computational instruments for drug growth. Alphabet spun out Isomorphic Labs to leverage DeepMind’s software program for drug design final November, and final spring Insitro landed $400 million in enterprise funding and Recursion pulled in $436 million in its IPO.
Attraction’s Collection A funding spherical was led by F-Prime Capital and OrbiMed. Different contributors have been Common Catalyst, Khosla Ventures, Braavos and Axial.
