AbSci Announces Acquisition of Deep Learning Company Denovium

VANCOUVER, Wash., Jan. 12, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- AbSci, a leading synthetic biology company enabling drug discovery and biomanufacturing of next-generation biotherapeutics, today announced the acquisition of Denovium, Inc., an artificial intelligence (AI) deep learning company. AbSci will integrate the Denovium Engine into its drug discovery and manufacturing cell line development capabilities and expects to realize near term synergies using AI deep learning to better predict relevant variants and cell line characteristics for each new project. With continued application and further training of the Denovium Engine, AbSci's vision is to make in silico biologic drug discovery and cell line development a reality. This will enable next-generation therapies to make it to market at unprecedented speeds. Terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed.

"This acquisition represents the perfect synergy of groundbreaking synthetic biology and cutting-edge deep learning AI to create in silico predictive protein drug design and cell line development capabilities with the potential to completely change the paradigm of biopharmaceutical discovery and development," said Sean McClain, founder and CEO of AbSci. "Incorporating deep learning will allow us to explore all possible protein sequences in silico, including those that Nature's evolutionary trajectory has yet to consider, to identify drug candidates with optimal therapeutic properties and manufacturability. Combining that design power with our proprietary data from our Protein Printing platform, AbSci can create a new gold standard for drug discovery and cell line development for next-generation biologics while at the same time allowing for creation of novel biologies previously unattainable."

The Denovium Engine is a multidimensional deep learning model built to interpret, categorize, predict, and evolve function and behavior of proteins. The platform incorporates far more than sequence and structure relationships, having been trained on functional data from more than 100 million proteins and across over 700,000 descriptive parameters. AbSci intends to further train the Denovium Engine on its proprietary internally-generated multidimensional protein characterization datasets that include elements of protein functionality, expression, and manufacturability.

"Training the Denovium Engine on the volumes of high-quality protein function and manufacturability data being generated by AbSci's Protein Printing platform allows our platform to reach its full potential of de novo design of manufacturable proteins having desirable functionalities," said Toby Richardson, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Denovium. "We expect that the platform will be able to design proteins by predicting not only the optimal sequence for each therapeutic candidate, but also the conditions for manufacturing, to enable production of therapeutic proteins that were previously not possible."

About Denovium Inc.

Denovium is an artificial intelligence company pioneering novel AI methods to accelerate innovation in biopharma. Founded by genomics and computer science experts, Denovium is building an artificial intelligence engine (Denovium Engine^TM) capable of interpreting disparate biological data types to answer biology's toughest questions. Denovium is partnering with leading biotech and pharma companies in specific areas of focus including gene discovery, protein engineering and genomic medicine.

About AbSci

AbSci is a leading synthetic biology company that translates ideas into drugs with a revolutionary platform technology that reinvents the biopharmaceutical drug discovery process. Our patented SoluPro^® E. coli expression system and Protein Printing™ platform enable simultaneous creation of novel biotherapeutic drugs and the cell lines to manufacture them in a single efficient process. In one workflow, we select cell lines producing drug candidates with optimal target potency and affinity as well as high-titer expression. Starting with a known drug sequence or with a target for novel drug discovery, our approach dramatically reduces biopharma discovery and development timelines from years to weeks by generating a GMP-ready manufacturing cell line for each asset. We specialize in next-generation biologics built on complex protein scaffolds, which have proven challenging for others to produce. With more than a dozen partnerships in place with top pharma and industry leaders, our collaborations include projects for 28 drugs and drug candidates that range across multiple protein types and therapeutic functionality. For more information, please visit https://www.absci.com. 

SOURCE AbSci

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