US-based immunotherapy discovery technology developer Seismic Therapeutic formally launched yesterday with $101m in series A funding from investors including internet technology group Alphabet’s GV unit.
Venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, which also featured Boxer Capital, Polaris Partners, Samsara BioCapital, angel investor Timothy Springer and the company’s founders and management team.
Seismic has built a machine learning-equipped biologics development platform dubbed Impact, which incorporates structural biology, protein engineering and translational immunology to help drug developers accelerate the process of discovering therapeutic targets for autoimmune disease.
The company will use the money to take its two lead drug candidates, which target antibody and cell-mediated autoimmunity respectively, toward clinical trials and improve Impact’s machine learning capabilities.
Jo Viney, co-founder, president and CEO of Seismic Therapeutic, said: “The time is right to move the needle in immunology, as advances in technology now enable us to discover medicines to address complex immune system biology in dramatically improved ways.
“We are leading the next generation of immunology drug development with Seismic’s platform. By integrating machine learning throughout the biologics drug discovery process, we are powered by a systematic and programmable approach to design superior biologics from initial discovery and therapeutic design through to manufacturability.”
Timothy Springer, co-founder of Seismic Therapeutic and a professor at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School, added: “Biologics drug development has undergone extraordinary advances in recent years, and the advent of machine learning working in concert with structural biology and protein engineering offers an entirely new trajectory for creating innovative biologics medicines.
“Seismic is taking a major leap forward by fully integrating machine learning throughout the biologics drug development process, whereas earlier efforts to date have generally used machine learning in a much less integrated way.”
GV has an active life sciences team that has helped the fund build a prolific portfolio, more than a third of which is in that area. Its interests cover aspects including healthcare delivery, health IT, devices, diagnostics and therapeutics.
The unit also revealed yesterday that it had reinvested in small molecule drug developer Ventus Therapeutics through a $140m series C round, having backed biotechnology developers such as Synapticure and TenSixteenBio in recent weeks.
