Protein engineering company Aperiam Bio recently announced its launch from stealth with a $9 million seed round led by OMX Ventures, with participation from Axial VC, KDT Ventures, and Civilization Ventures.
Proteins are known as the fundamental building blocks of life, but naturally only evolve to do enough to survive. And historically, businesses working with proteins have had to rely on time-consuming and expensive processes to improve how these proteins function within their products.
Despite significant recent scientific breakthroughs, the engineering of advanced proteins has been limited to university labs or a small number of companies undertaking laborious and expensive ultra-high throughput processes.
Aperiam Bio applies a patented, 3D computer vision algorithm – akin to ‘facial recognition for proteins’ – to identify succinct, targeted improvements to proteins that make them more effective and durable than they are in nature.
CEO Austin Cole has spent seven years developing this structure-first algorithm at UT-Austin’s Ellington Lab of Molecular Biosciences. And the algorithm allows scientists to bypass existing cumbersome protein engineering methods and deliver shelf-stable proteins with novel applicability across a wide range of human problems, from consumer applications to pulmonary therapeutics.
Aperiam Bio has shown its algorithms create product-enabling increases to proteins’ chemical, thermal, and mechanical stress tolerance by:
— Increasing the luminance of the blue fluorescent protein (BFP) by 10x and strengthening the protein’s chemical and thermal stress tolerance.
— More than doubling a wholly-owned protein’s tolerance to nebulization, thus unlocking therapeutic protein delivery to the lung.
— Showing the intended efficacy of this improved protein in an animal model, thereby unlocking a whole class of pulmonary biologic products.
Aperiam Bio’s seed round will expand R&D for its wholly owned products and advance the company’s work to date, building strong partnerships with companies that are tackling the wide array of problems where pulmonary products are the solution.
KEY QUOTES
“Proteins are nature’s C students. Our technology turns them into valedictorians. By developing more stable, targeted, and effective protein chemistries, we can deliver an entirely new class of products to the lung.”
— Aperiam Bio Founder and CEO Austin Cole
“There are a number of companies out there doing protein and enzyme design for biotech applications. What attracted us to Aperiam is the company’s proven ability to efficiently identify new and improved structural variants to existing proteins and apply those proteins to novel problems. Many of the markets in Aperiam’s sights, like consumer products and pulmonary products, have not leveraged this new and exciting generation of biotechnologies — and Aperiam intends to change that.”
— Nick Haft, Managing Director of OMX Ventures
