SAN CARLOS, Calif.– BigHat Biosciences, a novel protein therapeutics company and developer of an AI-guided antibody design platform, today announced it has raised $19 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round, led by Andreessen Horowitz, with participation from prior investors 8VC, AME Cloud Ventures and Innovation Endeavors. As part of the investment, Andreessen Horowitz General Partner, Vineeta Agarwala, MD, PhD joins BigHat’s Board of Directors.
Biologics represent a rapidly growing therapeutic category. As of 2019, seven of the top ten drugs were biologics and there are currently more than 200 biotherapeutics in use, generating more than $100 billion in annual revenue for drug companies developing treatments for indications ranging from oncology to auto-immunity to infectious disease.
“Our mission is to improve human health by making it far easier to create advanced, next-generation antibody and protein therapeutics. BigHat is transforming antibody design from bulk screening to data-driven engineering to give precise control over the antibodies’ molecular properties. Leveraging recent advances in synthetic biology and machine learning, our platform measures and optimizes antibodies for the biophysical and functional properties needed for cutting-edge therapeutic applications,” said BigHat Co-founder and CEO Mark DePristo, PhD.
BigHat integrates a wet lab for high-speed characterization with machine learning technologies to guide the search for better antibodies. This approach dramatically speeds up design and discovery data acquisition cycles to days rather than weeks or months. It also provides greater optionality, eliminating the need for premature candidate selection and enabling the simultaneous measurement of a vast array of key biophysical properties of many molecules.
“There are very few biologic applications in which you can pose a hypothesis and have real, experimentally validated answers in days. BigHat’s molecular engineering methods allow us to optimize antibodies for affinity, stability, solubility, and even performance in a functional assay,” added BigHat Co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer (CSO) Peyton Greenside, PhD. “We’ve just started to explore the potential for novel antibody and protein therapeutics enabled by BigHat’s approach to discovery.”
