LabGenius Raises $44.5M Series B to Advance AI-Driven Antibody Drug Discovery Platform

LabGenius to Expand Scope of ML-Driven Discovery Platform and Advance Fully-Owned Multispecific Antibody Pipeline Toward Clinic with Raised Funds. Building on Recent Success of Research Collaboration with Sanofi, Enhanced Platform Capabilities to Facilitate Broader Strategic Partnerships Across Multiple Therapeutic Modalities.

LabGenius's unique discovery capabilities are powered by EVA™: an intelligent robotic platform capable of designing and conducting experiments, and crucially, learning from its own experiments. This highly automated closed-loop discovery engine can rapidly identify high-performance antibodies through non-intuitive designs.

For its wholly-owned pipeline, the company is leveraging its platform to address the challenges of targeted, non-tumor toxicity. Therapeutic antibodies target diseased cells by binding to surface markers expressed at above-normal levels. In the case of solid tumors, one challenge with this approach is that subpopulations of healthy cells often express the same surface markers. If a therapeutic antibody cannot distinguish between healthy and diseased cells expressing the same surface marker, off-target tumor killing can occur. Toxicity through this mechanism is a significant concern for many therapies under development.

Combining potency, efficacy, and developability, optimizing the tumor selectivity of antibodies is a considerable challenge. Using traditional methods, antibodies are sequentially optimized for different properties of interest. This process is inherently inefficient as improving one attribute in isolation may lead to performance loss in other critical attributes. LabGenius’ pioneering technology platform employs an active learning approach known as Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimization (MOBO) to achieve effective co-optimization of antibodies across multiple important characteristics. In addition to being more efficient than traditional methods, the LabGenius process is designed to be free from human bias and generate high-performance antibodies with non-intuitive designs.

LabGenius CEO Dr. James Field stated:"Being able to design complex multispecific antibodies holds enormous potential value. For several years, the LabGenius team has been at the forefront of developing EVA™, a discovery platform capable of systematically identifying novel and highly effective multispecific antibodies with non-intuitive designs. I am deeply inspired by the relentless efforts our team has demonstrated in reaching this significant milestone and look forward to collaborating with investors as we accelerate the development of our platform and pipeline."