CerraCap Ventures portfolio company Totient acquired by Absci

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Jul 09, 2021, 05:00 ET

COSTA MESA, Calif., July 9, 2021 /PRNewswire/ -- CerraCap Ventures, a leading early-stage Venture Fund, today announced acquisition of its portfolio company Totient by Absci for an undisclosed amount. The transaction is the second exit from CerraCap's investment fund, CerraCap II LP.

Totient is an artificial intelligence-driven drug discovery platform that identifies and harnesses human immune responses to identify novel antibodies and their therapeutic targets. Absci is a synthetic biology company unlocking the potential of proteins as next-generation therapeutics. This acquisition adds antibody and target discovery technology to Absci's platform for therapeutic protein design and biomanufacturing optimization.

To date, Totient has reconstructed more than 4,500 antibodies from over 50,000 patients and has de-orphaned a collection of promising antibodies by identifying and validating their target antigens. Absci's high-throughput single cell protein expression systems and assays offer a platform for rapidly and systematically de-orphaning the computationally derived antibody sequences in Totient's growing library.

Both Totient and Absci share a vision to change the world by making the best medicine available to mankind. This acquisition is well aligned to build a deep library of natural human antibodies and target antigens that can be validated as new opportunities for drug development.

"We are delighted to see Totient's platform, and their talented R&D team becoming a part of Absci. This acquisition demonstrates success of CerraCap's 'Sales and Scale^™' model," said Saurabh Ranjan, Founder and CEO, CerraCap Ventures.

"This highly complementary acquisition will significantly accelerate the pipeline created by Totient. We look forward to the combined team's continued successes as they work to create breakthrough products," added Vikas Datt, Partner CerraCap Ventures.

"Totient's innovative work identifying disease-relevant molecules has exciting therapeutic potential," commented Sean McClain, founder and CEO of Absci. "We believe that the combination of the Totient technology with Absci's platform, including our Denovium AI, provides us the framework and data to enable in silico targeted drug design, and ultimately achieve our goals of making the best medicines available to patients in need."

"Together, Absci and Totient are much more than the sum of our parts, with clear opportunities for synergy of our platforms and technologies," said Deniz Kural, PhD, co-founder and CEO of Totient. "Our computational biology technology allows us to identify thousands of new antibodies and other categories of proteins, and with Absci, we look forward to scaling our target discovery capabilities to comprehensively de-orphan antibodies and validate new opportunities for drug development."

About Totient
Totient is an AI-driven biotechnology company that leverages tertiary lymphoid structures (TLSs) to identify novel tissue-specific antigens and develop matching high-affinity antibody therapeutics. Totient uses machine learning and immunoinformatic technology to pull critical insights from large, complex datasets, to assemble the most potent antibody candidates quickly and accurately. The unique applicability of the Totient platform allows the company to remain flexible and develop therapeutics for cancer, autoimmune disease, infections, and viruses. For more information, visit www.totient.bio.

About Absci
Absci is the AI-powered synthetic biology company unlocking the potential of proteins as the next generation of therapeutics. We built our Integrated Drug Creation™ Platform to accelerate discovery of novel biotherapeutic drug candidates and generation of the cell lines to manufacture them in a single efficient process. Biotech and pharma innovators partner with us to develop new protein-based drugs, including those that may be impossible to make with other technologies. Our goal is to enable the creation of better medicines by Translating Ideas into Drugs^™. For more information, please visit absci.com.

About CerraCap Ventures
CerraCap Ventures is a Global fund headquartered in Orange County, California dedicated to early-stage technology investments in enterprise (B2B) solutions focused on the new fundamentals of the digital age - Healthcare, Enterprise AI and Cyber Security. It enables rapid growth of technology startups leveraging its unique Sales & Scale™ business model, driving revenue from large enterprises into its portfolio companies. For more information, visit www.cerracap.com.

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SOURCE CerraCap Ventures