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LabGenius has closed a £35 million Series B financing round. The investment brings LabGenius’ total funding to date to £58 million.
The round was led by new investor M Ventures (the strategic, corporate venture capital arm of science and technology company Merck), with participation from additional new investors Octopus Ventures and LG Corp, together with existing investors including Atomico, Kindred Capital, Lux Capital and Obvious Ventures.
Oliver Hardick of M Ventures and Oliver Sims of Octopus Ventures have joined existing Directors Irina Haivas of Atomico, Leila Zegna of Kindred Capital, James Field (CEO) and Edwin Moses (Independent Chair) to form the Company’s new Board of Directors.
LabGenius will use the capital raised to expand the scope of its ML-driven discovery platform and progress a wholly-owned pipeline of multispecific antibodies towards the clinic. Building on the success of a recent research collaboration with Sanofi, the extended platform capability will facilitate broader strategic partnerships across multiple therapeutic modalities.
LabGenius’ unique discovery capability is powered by EVA: a smart robotic platform capable of designing, conducting and, critically, learning from its own experiments. This highly automated closed-loop discovery engine enables the rapid identification of high-performing antibodies with non-intuitive designs.
For its wholly-owned pipeline, the company is using its platform to address the challenge of on-target, off-tumour toxicity. Therapeutic antibodies target diseased cells by binding to surface markers that are present at higher-than-normal levels. In the case of solid tumours, a challenge with this approach is that sub-populations of healthy cells often express the same surface markers. If a therapeutic antibody fails to differentiate between healthy and diseased cells expressing the same surface markers, on-target off-tumour killing will occur. Toxicity via this mechanism is a significant issue for many therapeutics in development.
Dr. Oliver Hardick, of M Ventures, commented: “LabGenius’ differentiated ML-driven platform enables the rapid co-optimisation of complex multispecific antibodies across both disease-relevant cell-based assays and key developability assays. The LabGenius approach has the potential to address many of the fundamental challenges faced by antibody engineers. We are excited to lead this financing alongside our co-investors and partner with LabGenius’ exceptional team as they scale their platform and progress their pipeline towards the clinic.”
Dr. James Field, Chief Executive Officer of LabGenius, said “Being able to engineer complex multispecific antibodies has immense potential value. Over several years, the LabGenius team has pioneered the development of EVA - a discovery platform that’s capable of systematically identifying novel high-performing multispecific antibodies with non-intuitive designs. I am inspired by the relentless drive that our team has shown in getting us to this important milestone and look forward to working with our investors as we accelerate the development of both our platform and pipeline.”
Optimising antibodies for tumour selectivity in combination with other key factors like potency, efficacy and developability is a considerable challenge. With conventional methods, antibodies are sequentially optimised for different properties of interest. This process is inherently inefficient as improving one property in isolation can result in a performance loss across other key properties. LabGenius’ pioneering technology platform uses an active learning method called Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimisation (MOBO) to enable the efficient co-optimisation of antibodies across multiple important properties. In addition to being more efficient than conventional methods, the LabGenius process is also designed to be free from human bias and yields high-performing antibodies with non-intuitive designs.