Flagship Pioneering has thrown $50 million behind a push to create synthetic proteins that overcome the limitations of natural biologics. The money will support Abiologics, a biotech that has grown out of three years of work at Flagship to create a platform capable of birthing the new modality.
Abiologics is Flagship’s attempt to address the limitations of natural proteins and peptides. As naturally occurring molecules, proteins and peptides are recognized and destroyed by proteins, giving them short half-lives and typically preventing oral dosing. Optimization can overcome some stability problems but the work is painstaking.
Building drugs out of molecules other than the 20 naturally occurring amino acids offers a way to create more stable therapies. Abiologics is going down that route, with a focus on using chemically identical mirror images of standard amino acids to create synthetic peptides it calls Synteins.
First, Abiologics leverages the predictable folding rules of natural proteins to design digital blueprints for its synthetic molecules. Then, the biotech uses a set of artificial building blocks to chemically synthesize the molecule. The building blocks include D-amino acids, mirror image building blocks associated with better cell penetration and potency in some studies.
Long-standing interest in using D-amino acids to design drugs has been tempered by the limitations of technologies for engineering the building blocks into proteins. Piggybacking on the work of its cofounder Bradley Pentelute, Ph.D., of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Abiologics contends its platform makes the discovery and scale-up of polymers composed solely of artificial building blocks viable.
“Creating protein biologics with artificial building blocks rather than naturally occurring amino acids allows Synteins to go unrecognized by the immune system, offering significant advantages compared to today's biologics such as less frequent dosing, oral delivery and the ability to reach parts of the body that were previously impossible to access and treat,” Abiologics CEO Avak Kahvejian, Ph.D., said in a statement.
Biotechs such as Pearl Bio and GRO Biosciences are advancing other platforms for creating proteins from amino acids beyond the 20 seen in nature. Pearl and GRO Bio have both been in the news in recent months, respectively partnering with Merck & Co. and raising a $60.3 million series B round.