Protillion Biosciences Raises $18 Million Financing Led by ARCH Venture Partners and Illumina Ventures
Protillion Biosciences Raises $18 Million Financing Led by ARCH Venture Partners and Illumina Ventures
Protillion Biosciences‘ transformational drug discovery and optimization platform generates precise protein data with the scale to bridge advanced computation and real-world results. The platform can identify and optimize new protein therapeutics to accelerate R&D productivity.
Burlingame, CA. Dec 19, 2022: Protillion Biosciences, a privately held biotech company working to identify and optimize new protein therapeutics and accelerate biologic research and development productivity, has announced a raise of $18 million in financing from ARCH Venture Partners and Illumina Ventures. The Company’s platform enables its commercial drug discovery partners to perform true quantitative analysis on complete protein libraries, producing actionable insights in days; a process that can take months using current industry best practices. Protillion’s proprietary technology can generate and analyze massive experimental datasets at perfect amino acid resolution, enabling novel machine-learning approaches to antibody and binder discovery.
Protillion’s technology enables exquisite exploration of protein sequence space, facilitating a generational shift in high-throughput protein discovery,” said Sean Kendall, Partner at ARCH. "It bridges key gaps between computational methods and real-world performance, opening the door to the rapid development of novel and truly optimized biologics.
For the first time, quantitative binding measurements for millions of biologic candidates can be seen up-front, and big data is available much earlier in the discovery process,” said co-founder, Dr. Curtis Layton. "Our mission is to find better medicines via transformative technology that enables us to identify the best therapeutic molecules every time.
Curtis Layton, Ph.D., developed the technology in the Stanford University laboratory of co-founder William Greenleaf, Ph.D., ultimately organizing a new company, Protillion, in 2019 to commercialize the technology. Dr. Layton’s work pioneered a new approach to high-throughput interrogation of biochemical systems. By uniting a broad array of interdisciplinary fields, including protein engineering, next-generation sequencing technology, molecular biology, in vitro transcription and translation, computational biology, software development, and various engineering disciplines, he tackled ultra-high-impact technology approaches for drug discovery. Dr. Layton studied with Dr. Greenleaf as a postdoctoral fellow in the Genetics Department at Stanford University School of Medicine and received a Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Duke University.
In addition to Dr. Layton, co-founders of Protillion include David Walt, Ph.D. of the Wyss Institute at Harvard University, Brigham and Women's Hospital, and Harvard Medical School. Dr. Walt is a pioneer of single-molecule detection and analysis techniques and the scientific founder of Illumina, Inc., Quanterix Corp., and several other cutting-edge life science companies. He will serve on Protillion's Board of Directors. William Greenleaf, Ph.D. of the Stanford University School of Medicine is a member of Bio-X, the Biophysics Program, the Biomedical Informatics Program, and the Cancer Center. His prolific lab has generated many high-impact tools to better understand complex biological systems.
About Protillion Biosciences
Protillion Biosciences is a Stanford University spinout commercializing disruptive technology for
therapeutic antibody and binder discovery. While current state-of-the-art techniques for antibody
discovery and optimization may take months of laborious laboratory procedures executed by
highly-skilled practitioners, Protillion's high throughput instrumentation is capable of
characterizing the binding affinity on the order of 1 million antibody variants in a 2-day
automated run. Our unique approach enables the identification of better antibody candidates on
an exponentially faster timeline. For more information, visit www.protillion.com.
About ARCH Venture Partners
ARCH Venture Partners invests in advanced technology companies and is one of the world’s leading early-stage technology venture firms. The firm is a recognized leader in commercializingtechnologies developed at academic institutions, corporate research groups and national laboratories. ARCH invests primarily in companies it co-founds with leading scientists and entrepreneurs, bringing innovations in life sciences and physical sciences to market. For more information, visit www.archventure.com.
About Illumina Ventures
Illumina Ventures is an independently managed, healthcare-focused venture firm in a strategic partnership with Illumina, with the vision to unlock the power of the genome. As an early-stage, value-add investor, Illumina Ventures helps entrepreneurs develop breakthrough science and technologies into market-leading companies to transform healthcare. The firm focuses on investment in life science tools, therapeutics, diagnostics, and personal wellness. For more information, visit www.illuminaventures.com.
