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Marrying the powerful imaging capability of cryo-electron microscopy to the clever bride of AI, Vancouver startup Gandeeva Therapeutics now has $40 million to fund the honeymoon.
The union has one primary goal – speed up discovery and development to get effective drugs to patients sooner.
“For decades, we have known that understanding the language by which proteins are folded and function in the native context of the cell is fundamental to deciphering biology. Altered protein function is implicated in nearly every disease,” said Dr. Sriram Subramaniam, founder and CEO Gandeeva.
Previous approaches to studying the body’s building blocks have utilized X-ray crystallography. But the process is burdensome and inefficient in that the scientist has to pack the proteins together into a crystal to approximate shape and size with X-ray beams. Some molecules are unable to be crystallized or are changed by the process.
Cryo-Em solves these cumbersome speed bumps. Instead of crystallization, the technique requires simply flash-freezing solutions of proteins and shooting them with electrons to produce microscopic images that can reconstruct the 3D shape of the molecule.
Understanding a protein’s shape is essential as it determines how it behaves. Gandeeva’s CEO Subramaniam proved his point when his team unveiled atomic-level images of the Omicron variant spike protein of SARS-Cov-2. The analysis revealed how the changes to the protein help it evade antibodies to spread more effectively through the globe, despite vaccination and previous infection.
With the power of AI by its side, Gandeeva believes that these high-res pictures combined with AI that can predict how proteins fold will be the ticket to finding the suitable targets for making a true impact on treating disease. By chasing the correct targets, he hopes to avoid the pitfalls and dead ends that often occur in drug R&D.
Currently, in a six-year-leased facility outside Vancouver, the initial focus is to build out the functionality of Gandeeva’s platform. The biotech hasn’t revealed initial disease focus just yet, but oncology could be the firstborn.
Subramaniam spent the bulk of his career working for the NIH as chief of biophysics at the National Cancer Institute. He left there to pursue his cryo-EM platform dreams at the University of British Columbia, where he became Chair of Cancer Drug Design.
Gandeeva’s Series A was led by Lux Capital and LEAPS by Bayer. LEAPS has been busy announcing two other startup investments over the past week. Bayer‘s investment arm played a role in Megagenomi’s $175 million Series B round last Tuesday and helped lead the $80 million Series A for Cellino Biotech. The former uses AI to make next-gen gene editing therapeutics, while the latter is focused on stem cell-based regenerative therapies.
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