We raised preseed and seed funding from venture capital firms focusing on deep tech and life sciences from around the globe.
We finished our biosafety level 2 wet lab facility in Graz, Austria. The building was an old printing facility, and we amended it to meet the legal requirements for such a lab and our in-house requirements regarding biology and chemistry. We now have a working tissue culture, microbiology, general assay division, and high-content imaging in-house, and soon the synthesis chemistry and an operative team of about 22 FTEs to date.
We developed novel graph-based algorithms to predict the formation of ternary complexes, which are required to induce targeted protein degradation with degraders. A ternary complex is a molecular complex consisting of three entities. In our context, it's
1. the protein to be degraded
2. an enzyme that triggers degradation, and
3. a molecule (the degrader) that connects these two biomolecules.
This project's most recent and recognizable success is the positive biological validation of one of our novel compounds for our Oncology I program as hit. We're further validating the hit and so far, have western blots that show degradation and SPR data that confirm the assumption. Soon, we'll start an additional Series based on the results to optimize that compound further.
Forming a ternary complex requires multiple steps, which we divide into DTI (drug-target interactions) and PPI (protein-protein interactions). Additionally, since both fragments binding to the biomolecules are mostly given, the linking fragment (linker) is of significant relevance for degraders. For this reason, generating relevant linkers is an important part of the computer-based pipeline.
The modules of our platform can be hosted in various computational environments. We successfully hosted it so far on Microsoft Azure, Amazon AWS, Google Cloud, and in-house infrastructure.
