Archon exits outrage with $20M and ‘immune cages’ to boost drug development

Archon Biosciences, a biotech startup that puts AI to work designing novel biomolecules, has just emerged from an impressive $20 million funding round. The company aims to supercharge immune therapy using protein “cages” that multiply their effects, opening up new opportunities for drug development.

This is the first company to graduate from Baker Lab, the University of Washington research outfit directed by computational biologist and recent Nobel Prize winner David Baker. His team’s work in the design of artificial proteins using AI and other methods has been fundamental to the developing industry, and Archon is taking some aspect of it to market.

One drawback of immunotherapy (and research into active therapies) is that, like all molecular biology, the process is somewhat haphazard. It is difficult to control how much of an antibody or protein actually binds to its target in a cell or elsewhere.

What Archon’s antibody cages, or AbCs, do (as documented in this paper published in Science) is provide a scaffold to repair and replicate their function. A free-floating antibody may only have a small chance of binding to a target protein, but if you were to stick a dozen of them together in a giant dodecahedron, that dramatically and perhaps profoundly improves that chance.

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

“There are many high-level cases where we understand not only the biology of the target but also why previous attempts to take a drug have failed in the clinic. These important disease molecules are in our hands, but we don’t have the tools to engage them safely and effectively, “explains James Lazarovits, founder and CEO of Archon in a press conference. “We have created a protein design platform with rapid in-house production and testing to change the way biologics are developed.”

The startup’s protein design platform uses protein synthesis and simulation tools created and licensed from Baker Lab, and the resulting AbCs can have a variety of effects. And they don’t require any fancy production methods – if you can produce proteins and antibodies at scale, you can 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; comes with more than $7 million in grants from multiple agencies and federal agencies.

Archon is similar to UW and Baker Lab, based in Seattle. TechCrunch will visit soon to learn and share more about this promising spinout.