Archon Biosciences emerges from stealth with $20M to create tiny ‘Antibody Cages’
Three weeks after University of Washington biochemist David Baker won a Nobel Prize, the latest venture to spin out from his lab — Archon Biosciences — has emerged from stealth mode with $20 million in financing for a technology that uses computationally designed protein structures to treat cancer and other diseases.
The seed funding round was led by Madrona Ventures, with participation from DUMAC Inc., Sahsen Ventures, WRF Capital, Pack Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments and Cornucopian Capital.
Archon’s proprietary protein structures, known as Antibody Cages or AbCs, have been years in the making. Archon’s CEO and co-founder, James Lazarovits, said the Nobel Prize that Baker won for his pioneering work in the field of protein design confirms his view that the newly unveiled startup is on the right track.
“It’s reaffirmed our conviction for why we’re in this place to begin with,” Lazarovits told GeekWire during a tour of Archon’s Seattle lab. “It’s doing things that were not possible before. … You could not do anything that we’re doing unless there was the convergence of all these different fields at this moment in time.”
The ABCs of AbCs
Archon’s AbC technology combines two molecular-based biomedical tools, naturally occurring antibodies and custom-designed proteins, to create a single new protein structure. These protein structures, or AbCs, are optimized with the aid of generative AI to travel in the body in controllable ways and engage with target cells in a more specific manner.
“There was almost no mystery in whether we could do it,” said George Ueda, Archon’s chief technology officer and co-founder. “It was just a matter of doing it.”
AbCs can be compared to Lego blocks, or to car frames, in the sense that different types of components can be mixed and matched for different purposes.
“At Volkswagen, if you want to make a mini-car or an SUV, they share a design framework known as MQB that shares parts and equipment for improved flexibility, cost savings and speed across multiple factories,” Lazarovits explained.
“By building a modular design platform, we readily iterate and optimize each design quickly, efficiently and inexpensively, based on data that comes in,” he said. “It’s a validated and efficient engineering framework that we employ at Archon to make better therapeutics faster. We can make two drugs for two different applications, and make it easier to do both.”
The custom-built nature of AbCs helps antibodies bind to the cells they’re supposed to target, while reducing side effects on cells that the AbCs are not intended to affect. “What we like to say is, it’s not whether you’re given a drug, it’s how you’re given it,” Lazarovits said. “How it behaves is actually incredibly important. … It’s not only how it’s distributed and retained, but also how it interacts with its target.”
Archon has already started to put AbCs through animal testing. “We’re printing off new AbCs every eight minutes,” Lazarovits said. “We have data to show we beat out a previous clinical molecule that failed to pass Phase II human trials, and we showed we were able to overcome the issues that limited the molecule’s success. And so, the AbC platform isn’t theoretical — we are making real products.”
This short Archon video shows how Antibody Cages are created:
Building a business
The work being done by Archon’s staff of 17 full-time employees has benefited from academic grants.
“As research faculty at the University of Washington, George and I were very on top of things with respect to grant funding,” Lazarovits said. “We earned / won over $7 million in grants, so we were in a position where we were essentially in the pre-seed stage. … We are asking these important questions that we know every investor would want to know, but we’re not doing it on anybody’s dime.”
A research paper laying out the concept behind Antibody Cages was published in the journal Science in 2021, and Ueda recalled discussing how to commercialize the technology with Baker, another one of Archon’s co-founders.
“David said, ‘Well, George, if we do this, no one’s going to develop it for you. … Have you ever thought about starting a company?'” Ueda recalled. “I said, ‘No, but I can’t not do this.’ There’s another shared belief that Jamie and I have — that if you have a unique opportunity, it’s on you to do it.”
Ueda and Lazarovits followed a path that’s much like the one taken by earlier spinouts from the University of Washington’s Institute for Protein Design. They licensed the AbC technology from UW and incorporated Archon Biosciences in 2023.
Even before Archon was founded, the researchers were on Madrona Ventures’ radar screen. “AbCs are a revolutionary approach to antibody therapeutics that creates immediately actionable engineering solutions to intractable drug development challenges,” Chris Picardo, who’s a partner at Madrona Ventures and one of Archon’s board members, said today in a news release.
“James and George have assembled a team of world-class scientists and pharmaceutical industry veterans that is able to create new preclinical molecules with extraordinary speed and accuracy,” Picardo said. “We’re excited to partner with them at the forefront of generative protein design and realize the myriad of possibilities to engage currently undruggable targets and pathways to improve human health.”
Taking aim at cancer
Archon is already focusing in on its first therapeutic applications, most likely including cancer treatment.
“We can either make a cancer cell die a lot, die a little bit, be neutral, or target an immune cell that fights the cancer and turn that up, activate that,” Ueda said.
Lazarovits said it’s too early to be more specific about the applications.
“There are very obvious applications in oncology,” he said. “We’re currently not going into explicit detail on the program, but we’re in a fortunate position. … Because we can insert ourselves so well into this established framework, we hope in the not-too-distant future that we’ll have these lead programs defined.”
The newly announced funding round is meant to take Archon to the next level.
“We will get to a point with this money that we will be able to clearly articulate our lead program, and how it offers differentiated value relative to therapeutics that have previously developed or deployed in a clinic,” Lazarovits said. “I would say that probably within the next 18 months, we’ll have strong conviction over lead programs to move into the clinic.”