Flagship Pioneering, the bioplatform innovation company, today unveiled Abiologics, a company reimagining biologics with the creation of a new class of supranatural and programmable medicines, called Synteins™. Synteins are computationally-generated and synthesized with novel building blocks, endowing them with extraordinary properties to bring life-changing treatments to patients across a wide range of diseases. Flagship has initially committed $50 million to advance the company’s platform and develop a diverse pipeline of medicines, with an initial focus on oncology and immunology indications.
“Biologics have transformed medicine in the past forty years, but only a fraction of their potential has been realized because we’ve been limited by the boundaries of nature,” said Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and Co-Founder and Chairman of the Strategic Oversight Board of Abiologics. “With the convergence of advancements in generative artificial intelligence, automated polymer synthesis and chemical functionalization coupled with a vision to develop more powerful medicines with unprecedented diversity, we asked, what if we could design biologics entirely from new building blocks that could overcome the most critical limitations of today’s medicines?”
The Abiologics platform is a fully integrated digital and automated wet-lab infrastructure to create supranatural biologics with powerful, desirable pharmacological properties. The platform leverages state-of-the-art generative artificial intelligence (AI) to computationally-design Synteins de novo using a broad set of artificial building blocks, far beyond the 20 naturally occurring amino acids that form the basis of today’s biologic medicines. These include biologics built with D-amino acids, chemically identical mirror images of standard amino acids. Once designed, Abiologics chemically synthesizes its digitally-optimized Synteins with pioneering new technologies. As a result, Synteins can be programmed to interact with virtually any therapeutic target while evading the body’s natural defenses. By surpassing the limitations of traditional biologics discovery tools, Abiologics is the first to discover, prototype and scale-up polymers composed solely of artificial building blocks, and to date has successfully generated Synteins made entirely of D-amino acids that bind a diversity of therapeutically relevant targets while remaining ultrastable.
“For the first time, we are able to imagine and generate chemically synthesized biologics at scale and with increasing programmability, offering a new class of medicines with transformative potential,” said Avak Kahvejian, Ph.D., Co-Founder and CEO of Abiologics and General Partner at Flagship Pioneering. “Creating protein biologics with artificial building blocks rather than naturally occurring amino acids allows Synteins to go unrecognized by the immune system, offering significant advantages compared to today’s biologics such as less frequent dosing, oral delivery and the ability to reach parts of the body that were previously impossible to access and treat. With Synteins, Abiologics is poised to bring boundary-breaking medicines to patients across a range of diseases.”
In addition to Afeyan and Kahvejian, Abiologics’ founding team includes Mike Hamill, Ph.D., Chief Innovation Officer of Abiologics and Senior Principal at Flagship Pioneering, Kala Subramanian, Ph.D., Founding President of Abiologics and Operating Partner at Flagship Pioneering, Jaclyn Dunphy, Ph.D., Senior Director of Strategy and Research Operations at Abiologics, and Alicia Kaestli, Ph.D., Senior Associate at Flagship Pioneering. Bradley Pentelute, Ph.D., Professor of Chemistry at MIT, is an Academic Co-Founder of Abiologics.