Manifold bio6/5/2023 It was not until his Master’s degree in CS that he realized he was missing out: “I had one more credit, and I decided to take Manolis Kellis’ bioinformatics class. Gleb Kuznetsov (CEO) avoided biology as an undergraduate at MIT. The round has enabled Manifold Bio to move into a significantly expanded laboratory where it will grow the team, accelerate its efforts advancing internal drug programs, and advance its protein engineering platform to support expanded indications and partnerships.Ī computer scientist originally, Dr. Existing investors Playground Global, Fifty Years, and FAST by GETTYLAB also participated. In July 2022, Manifold announced a $40 million Series A financing led by Triatomic Capital and joined by Section 32, FPV Ventures, Horizons Ventures, and Tencent. With groundbreaking tech in hand, Manifold’s team is now in the early stages of building a pipeline of bespoke protein therapeutics with increased selectivity for target tissues or tumors. How do you tell where the protein or the drug is going in a complex living environment?” describes Kuznetsov. Each protein drug is tagged with a protein barcode called an M-Code that allows simultaneous tracking and quantitation of proteins in different tissue types: "Manifold’s vision was to unlock in vivo screening broadly for proteins and other biologic agents. Their M-Design platform allows for pooled in vivo testing of protein therapeutics. The benefits of such an approach to drug developers, and ultimately patients, would be manifold.Ĭo-founded in 2018 by Gleb Kuznetsov (CEO), Pierce Ogden (CSO), Shane Lofgren (Head of BD) and George Church, Manifold Bio uses technology developed in Church’s lab to eliminate a key bottleneck in biologic drug development. Technology that could evaluate many complex drugs, in parallel and in vivo, would more closely resemble “real biology” and may overcome the pitfalls en route to successful clinical translation. Many of these high-throughput efforts to screen small molecules or biologic agents have occurred in the lab dish-a flat world, which is a highly abstracted version of biology: “How do you go beyond the limitations of in vitro systems and get early feedback from challenging a drug design with the full complexity of a living organism?” asks Dr. Looking to model nature’s approach, scientists have long sought to develop highly multiplexed methods to increase the efficiency of finding new therapeutic agents. Over eons, innumerable organisms were evaluated in parallel, with the “fittest” selected to pass on their genetic material.Ĭlassic drug discovery-testing one agent, in one dish or one animal, at one time-stands in stark contrast to the massively parallel nature of evolution. Billions of molecules thrown together in the ancient “primordial soup” led to the assembly of complex biomolecules, and eventually the first primitive forms of life.
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