SAN DIEGO & CAMBRIDGE, Mass.– Differentiated Therapeutics (dx/tx), a biotech company focused on computationally predicting and optimizing targeted protein degraders (TPDs), today announced the completion of a $5 million Seed financing. Curie.Bio, a founder-focused seed-stage venture capital firm, financed the round.
Differentiated Therapeutics was founded by CEO Bryce Allen, PhD, COO Diala Ezzeddine, PhD, and Professor Isaac Kohane, MD PhD, of Harvard Medical School (HMS). Bryce Allen has a demonstrated track record in developing innovative computational approaches to designing small molecule therapeutics, most recently as a founding member of Silicon Therapeutics, acquired by Roivant Sciences in 2021 for $450 million. At Silicon, he was a key architect of the physics-based platform, and led the computationally-driven design and optimization of a best-in-class STING agonist currently in the clinic. Diala Ezzeddine is an entrepreneur with a successful track record, including as founding CBO at X-Chem Pharmaceuticals, the premier DEL company she helped build and sell, and as founding CEO of venture-backed X-Chem spinoff, Xios Therapeutics. Isaac Kohane is Chair of the Department of Biomedical Informatics at Harvard Medical School, and a thought leader in computationally-enabled medicine.
Dx/tx has built Auto/dx, a unique platform integrating proprietary methodologies in molecular simulation of protein interaction dynamics, AI, and synthetic biology.
“Targeted protein degradation is an emerging therapeutic modality with tremendous potential to transform medicine, but a major limitation is the scarcity of predictive methodologies for the rational design of bifunctional and molecular glue degraders,” said dx/tx founder and CEO Bryce Allen. “Optimizing the rate, extent, and duration of degradation is critical for enabling next generation TPD therapeutics. By accurately modeling the conformational basis of induced proximity, and iteratively refining the model with high-content live-cell kinetic data, Auto/dx reliably predicts degradability of therapeutic targets, and enables the design and optimization of degraders with a precise desired profile.”
“Dx/tx has successfully deployed Auto/dx to generate effective degraders for several therapeutic targets that have been historically difficult to drug,” said dx/tx co-founder and COO Diala Ezzeddine. “We will now utilize the Seed funds to design and develop a portfolio of disease-modifying TPD candidates with the right profile for potently and selectively degrading important genetic drivers of cancer.”
