Antiverse, a BioTech company designing antibodies for challenging targets, has added £3.5 million to its seed funding round.
The investment will facilitate the Cardiff company’s growth, including appointments to strengthen the team and continued development of its antibody design programmes, many in partnership with pharmaceutical companies.
The latest investment round was led by i&i Biotech Fund I (i&i Bio) and Kadmos Capital, with additional investment from existing investors InnoSpark Ventures, UKI2S (managed by Future Planet Capital), Tensor Ventures, and AngelHub. This brings the total equity financing raised to £7.2m.
The funding will be used to expand the company’s laboratory and machine learning teams, bolstering the development of its internal assets against G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs) and ion channels towards the clinic, as well as facilitating ongoing collaborations with pharma and biotech companies.
The funding will also be used to improve the predictive accuracy of the design platform, focusing on curating training data. Lastly, Antiverse has opened new facilities in Boston, MA, and Prague, Czech Republic, demonstrating its expansion.
Antiverse uses a machine-learning-centred approach to design antibodies for challenging targets, helping to bring needed therapies to patients. The current version of the platform uses ‘target-specific libraries’. These libraries are designed by using structural and sequence data to generate a library with high confidence against the target.
This enhances the predictive accuracy compared to traditional antibody libraries, enabling Antiverse to design antibodies for many challenging targets, including GPCRs and ion channels. The platform accelerates the antibody discovery process to 6 months.
Murat Tunaboylu, co-founder and CEO of Antiverse, said: “A third of all FDA-approved drugs target GPCRs, yet, despite decades of research and billions of funding, only a few GPCR-targeting antibodies exist. Thanks to the support of our investors, we are one step closer to making GPCRs and other challenging targets druggable, bringing needed therapies to patients across the globe.”