Archon comes out of stealth with $20 million and “antibody cages” to advance drug development

Archon Biosciences, a biotech startup that uses AI to develop novel biomolecules, just emerged from stealth with an impressive $20 million in seed funding. The company's goal is to accelerate antibody treatments using specially designed protein cages that multiply their effects, opening up new opportunities in drug development.

This is the first company to emerge from Baker Lab, the University of Washington research facility led by computational biology pioneer and recent Nobel Prize winner David Baker. His team's work on generative protein design using AI and other means has been fundamental to the rapidly evolving industry, and Archon is bringing a particular aspect of it to market.

A shortcoming of antibody treatments (and research into effective treatments) is that, as with all molecular biology, the process depends somewhat on chance. It is difficult to control how strongly an antibody or protein actually binds to its target on a cell or other surface.

What Archon's antibody cages, or AbCs, do (as documented in this paper published in Science) is to provide a scaffold for modifying and multiplying their effectiveness. A free-floating antibody may have only a small chance of binding to a target protein, but putting a dozen of them together in a large dodecahedron increases that chance significantly, perhaps even fundamentally.

This can mean the difference between being able to tell whether a drug is working or not.

“There are many high-profile cases where we understand not only the biology of a target, but also why previous attempts to treat the target with drugs have failed in the clinic. These important disease levers are available to us, but we lack the tools to address them safely and effectively,” said James Lazarovits, co-founder and CEO of Archon, in a press release. “We have developed a proprietary protein design platform coupled with rapid in-house manufacturing and testing to revolutionize the way biologics are developed.”

The startup's protein design platform leverages the generative protein creation and simulation tools developed and licensed at Baker Lab, and the resulting AbCs could have a variety of effects. And they don't require exotic manufacturing methods – if you can make proteins and antibodies on a large scale, you can probably make AbCs too.

The $20 million round was led by Madrona Ventures with participation from DUMAC Inc., Sahsen Ventures, WRF Capital, Pack Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments and Cornucopian Capital; It comes on top of about $7 million in grants from a number of institutes and government agencies.

Archon, like UW and Baker Lab, is based in Seattle. TechCrunch will be joining us soon to learn and share more about this promising spinout.