LabGenius Secures £35 Million to Enhance ML-Driven Antibody Discovery

LabGenius, a leading drug discovery company leveraging machine learning (ML) to discover novel therapeutic antibodies, has successfully completed a £35 million Series B financing round. This latest investment brings the company's total funding to £58 million.

The financing round was spearheaded by M Ventures, the corporate venture capital arm of Merck, and saw contributions from new investors such as Octopus Ventures and LG Corp. Existing investors including Atomico, Kindred Capital, Lux Capital, and Obvious Ventures also participated. With this infusion of capital, Oliver Hardick from M Ventures and Oliver Sims from Octopus Ventures have joined LabGenius' Board of Directors, which already includes representatives from Atomico, Kindred Capital, CEO James Field, and Independent Chair Edwin Moses.

James Field (LabGenius) and Oliver Hardick (M Ventures)

LabGenius plans to use the funds to enhance its ML-driven discovery platform and advance its pipeline of multispecific antibodies toward clinical development. This initiative builds on the success of a recent collaboration with Sanofi, aiming to enable broader strategic partnerships across various therapeutic areas.

The company's proprietary discovery platform, EVA™, is a smart robotic system that can autonomously design, conduct, and learn from experiments. This automated closed-loop engine significantly accelerates the identification of high-performing antibodies with unique designs.

See also: AbSci and Other AI-Powered Biotechs Lead the Way in Antibody Discovery

A key focus of LabGenius' pipeline is addressing on-target, off-tumour toxicity, a common challenge in treating solid tumours. Traditional therapeutic antibodies may inadvertently target healthy cells expressing the same surface markers as diseased cells, leading to significant toxicity. LabGenius aims to overcome this by optimizing antibodies for tumour selectivity and other critical factors such as potency, efficacy, and developability using its advanced platform.

LabGenius' platform employs Multi-Objective Bayesian Optimisation (MOBO), an active learning method that enables the efficient co-optimization of antibodies across multiple properties simultaneously. This approach is more efficient than conventional methods and reduces human bias, producing high-performing antibodies with innovative designs.

Dr. Oliver Hardick from M Ventures highlighted the advantages of LabGenius' platform:

“LabGenius’ differentiated ML-driven platform enables the rapid co-optimisation of complex multispecific antibodies across both disease-relevant cell-based assays and key developability assays. The LabGenius approach has the potential to address many of the fundamental challenges faced by antibody engineers. We are excited to lead this financing alongside our co-investors and partner with LabGenius’ exceptional team as they scale their platform and progress their pipeline towards the clinic.”

Dr. James Field, CEO of LabGenius, expressed enthusiasm for the progress and potential of the EVA platform in developing multispecific antibodies:

“Being able to engineer complex multispecific antibodies has immense potential value. Over several years, the LabGenius team has pioneered the development of EVA - a discovery platform that’s capable of systematically identifying novel high-performing multispecific antibodies with non-intuitive designs. I am inspired by the relentless drive that our team has shown in getting us to this important milestone and look forward to working with our investors as we accelerate the development of both our platform and pipeline.”

Dr. Edwin Moses, Chairman of LabGenius’ Board, praised the team and the platform's potential to meet high unmet medical needs, ensuring rewards for stakeholders.