BOULDER, Colo.– BioLoomics, the company pioneering directed evolution of target degrading antibodies using human cells, today announced it has raised $8.7 million in seed financing to advance its proprietary platform technology and antibody degrader programs. The round was led by Innovation Endeavors, with participation from Horizons Ventures, TechU Ventures, Boom Capital Ventures, Hummingbird Nomads Fund, Cooley GC&H, BoxOne Ventures and Viswa Colluru (Founder of Enveda).
Dr. Doug Chapnick, a veteran of cell biology with 20 years’ experience engineering in the life sciences space, led technology development and research in the DARPA funded ‘Rapid Threat Assessment (RTA)’ project at the University of Colorado, Boulder. He founded BioLoomics to apply principles from the RTA project to overcome market-wide throughput limitations for activity-based discovery of antibodies. Since its inception, BioLoomics has been utilizing its human cell directed evolution platform to evolve fluorescent reporter cells with industry leading quantitative power to fuel B2B partnerships and the adaptability of the platform to a wide variety of target classes. The multidisciplinary team combines expertise in antibody and cell engineering, imaging, robotics, and machine learning.
“Our mission is to make safer, more effective cancer therapeutics by hijacking how human proteins move antibodies around the cell,” said Dr. Douglas Chapnick, founder and CEO of BioLoomics. “We’re excited to have support from Innovation Endeavors, with a shared vision that accelerated protein design requires not just Machine Learning, but immense testing throughput. With our unique directed evolution technology, we design and test unique spatial activities of antibody designs 10,000x more than legacy methods. This capability opens doors to encode antibodies with functional activities like degradation, translocation, and AND-logic.”
“BioLoomics is a great example of how we envision our concept of Super Evolution manifesting in the life sciences to accelerate therapeutic solutions for major unmet clinical needs. BioLoomics stands out with its directed evolution platform using human cells with the potential to generate new and exciting antibody modalities that expand our toolbox against disease,” said Dr. Joel Dudley, Partner at Innovation Endeavors.
With this new capital, BioLoomics will develop pre-clinical assets and form strategic partnerships with large pharma companies. The team is actively recruiting for CSO and CTO roles.
Dr. Nick Saccomano recently joined BioLoomics as its Independent Board Director. An industry leader who was formerly the CSO of Array Biopharma and SVP at Pfizer, Dr. Saccomano brings deep experience leveraging tech and novel modalities to solve unmet needs in diseases.
