WATERTOWN, Mass.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Seismic Therapeutic, Inc., a biotechnology company advancing machine learning for immunology drug development, today announced its launch and financing of $101 million. The Series A was led by Lightspeed Venture Partners with participation from lead founding investors Timothy A. Springer and Polaris Partners, along with new investors GV, Boxer Capital, Samsara BioCapital, and management and founders. Seismic’s IMPACT™ platform systematically integrates machine learning, structural biology, protein engineering and translational immunology to invent novel biologics and optimize properties with significantly improved efficiency and scale over conventional therapeutics discovery. With this new approach, Seismic Therapeutic is accelerating a pipeline of biologics targeting dysregulated adaptive immunity to treat autoimmune diseases.
“The time is right to move the needle in immunology, as advances in technology now enable us to discover medicines to address complex immune system biology in dramatically improved ways,” said Jo Viney, PhD, Founder, President and CEO of Seismic Therapeutic. “We are leading the next generation of immunology drug development with Seismic’s platform. By integrating machine learning throughout the biologics drug discovery process, we are powered by a systematic and programmable approach to design superior biologics from initial discovery and therapeutic design through to manufacturability.”
The Series A financing will support Seismic Therapeutic’s further advancement toward the clinic of its first two lead drug programs, one targeting Ig (immunoglobulin)-mediated autoimmunity and the other targeting cell-mediated autoimmunity. In addition, the company will continue to build its proprietary IMPACT platform to make further advancements to machine learning technologies applied to immunology therapeutics.
“This strong financing and syndicate enable Seismic to aggressively advance multiple product candidates to the clinic. Through its leading edge integration of machine learning into drug development, the company is well positioned to be an important innovator in immunology,” said Alan Crane, Founder and Chairman of Seismic Therapeutic and Entrepreneur Partner at Polaris Partners.
IMPACT™ Platform “parallelizes” interdisciplinary components of drug discovery
The IMPACT platform enables the generation of drug molecules on an unprecedented scale in order to engineer better therapeutic solutions in immunology. The comprehensive integration of machine learning with protein engineering, structural biology and translational immunology enables the accelerated design and analysis of vast numbers of proteins and protein modifications in parallel. This parallelized process enables simultaneous optimization for biologic function and for developability, resulting in the creation of novel biologics with superior properties bypassing the trial and error methods of conventional biologics development with its challenges of balancing multiple factors of efficacy and manufacturability.
“Biologics drug development has undergone extraordinary advances in recent years, and the advent of machine learning working in concert with structural biology and protein engineering offers an entirely new trajectory for creating innovative biologics medicines,” said Timothy Springer, PhD, Founder of Seismic Therapeutic and Professor at Boston Children’s Hospital and Harvard Medical School. “Seismic is taking a major leap forward by fully integrating machine learning throughout the biologics drug development process, whereas earlier efforts to date have generally used machine learning in a much less integrated way.”
World-class team of drug developers, machine learning innovators, and immunology experts
“The Seismic team has made rapid progress in building a world-class platform for immunology drug innovation, incorporating the power of machine learning and guided by the team’s expert drug hunters, technology integrators and company builders. We look forward to the exciting future for this company and the immunology medicines it will advance for patients,” said Shelley Chu, MD, PhD, Partner, Lightspeed Venture Partners.
The Seismic Therapeutic team brings together experienced biotechnology leaders with decades of industry expertise in company building and drug development. Company leadership includes:
- Alan Crane, Founder, Chairman
- Jo Viney, PhD, Founder, President and CEO
- Nathan Higginson-Scott, PhD, Chief Technology Officer and Senior VP Drug Creation
- Kevin Otipoby, PhD, Senior VP Immunology
- Edward Freedman, JD, Chief Financial Officer
- John Sundy, MD, PhD, Incoming Chief Medical Officer and Head of R&D
Academic Founders of Seismic Therapeutic include world-renowned experts with track records that span decades of pioneering work in immunology mechanisms, structural biology of antibodies and proteins, and machine learning for protein engineering.
- Timothy Springer, PhD, Latham Family Professor and Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School; and Principal Investigator and Professor of Medicine, Program in Cellular and Molecular Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital
- Debora Marks, MBChB, PhD, Associate Professor of Systems Biology, Harvard Medical School
- Jeffrey Ravetch, MD, PhD, the Theresa and Eugene M. Lang Professor and head of the Leonard Wagner Laboratory of Molecular Genetics and Immunology at the Rockefeller University
- Andrew Kruse, PhD, Professor of Biological Chemistry and Molecular Pharmacology, Harvard Medical School
- Eric Sundberg, PhD, Professor and Chair, Department of Biochemistry, Emory University School of Medicine
About Seismic Therapeutic
Seismic Therapeutic is a biotechnology company integrating machine learning across the entire biologics discovery process to accelerate immunology drug development. Using its IMPACT™ platform, the company is addressing the central challenges of biologics discovery and development by fully integrating machine learning with the key elements of biologics drug discovery – structural biology, protein engineering and translational immunology – to create optimized therapies on an accelerated path to patients. Seismic Therapeutic has an emerging pipeline of novel biologics to address adaptive immune system dysregulation to treat autoimmune diseases. The company is backed by a strong syndicate of life sciences investors and is located in the Boston biotechnology hub. For more information, please visit www.seismictx.com and follow up on Twitter @Seismic_Tx and on LinkedIn.
