Adaptyv Biosystems secures funding from Y Combinator
© 2021 Adaptyv Biosystems Team ( From right to left: Julian Englert, Moustafa Houmani, Amir Shahein and Daniel Nakhaee-Zadeh Gutierrez)
Adaptyv Biosystems – an EPFL-based startup which specialises in antibody screening – has received a pre-seed investment from the world’s most selective startup accelerator, Y Combinator. Based in Mountain View, California, Y Combinator has funded over 3,000 companies including Airbnb, Coinbase and Ginkgo Bioworks.
The process of identifying new antibodies is key to being able to combat different diseases such as viral infections, autoimmune disease, and cancers. The team at Adaptyv have developed a new protein engineering technology which is quicker, cheaper, and offers higher quality data on the performance of potential antibodies.
Adaptyv Biosystems was selected from amongst over 15,000 startups who applied for this year's summer batch. The 3-month program culminates at the end of August with Demo Day, an invitation-only event where the startups will present in front of over 1,000 international investors to raise further funding.
The founders Daniel Nakhaee-Zadeh Gutierrez, Amir Shahein, Moustafa Houmani, and Julian Englert are currently validating the startup's technology in several pilots with industrial partners. Thier technology engineers proteins using cell-free systems on highly automated nanofluidic platforms. Instead of relying on genetically engineered living cells to produce a protein of interest, cell-free systems are made of only the biochemical components needed to turn a DNA sequence into a protein. By avoiding the handling of living cells, cell-free systems can be miniaturized and automated, meaning thousands of protein variants can be screened in parallel.
Thanks to this technology, the Adaptyv team can generate massive amounts of high-quality data about the protein designs - their stability, solubility, and target binding. With this knowledge, Adaptyv helps pharma and biotech companies identify the best protein designs to pursue in further stages of development. The data can also be used to train machine learning models and predict the properties of new protein designs. Researchers and industry alike are limited by the amount of real experimental data they can obtain to validate their computational predictions. Thus, Adaptyv solves a critical bottleneck for enabling better protein engineering tools.
For more information about Adaptyv Biosystems visit their website at https://adaptyvbio.com or get in touch directly with Julian Englert ([email protected]).