Dive Brief:
- Attovia Therapeutics, a biotech startup headquartered in Fremont, California, launched Tuesday with $60 million in funding and plans to develop medicines for autoimmune diseases and cancer.
- The company is a spinout of another Californian biotech, Alamar Biosciences, and helmed by Tao Fu, a Frazier Life Sciences venture partner and former senior executive at Zai Lab and Portola Pharmaceuticals.
- Attovia’s platform is built around what it terms “Attobody” technology, which is designed to create drugs that more effectively bind to hard-to-reach targets such as G protein-coupled receptors, or GPCRs.
Dive Insight:
An estimated one-third of medicines approved by the Food and Drug Administration through 2017 target a GPCR in some way.
Many of these drugs focus on the same GPCRs, with hosts of others long considered “undruggable.” That’s changing now as companies like Attovia take advantage of advances in protein engineering to design new types of medicines against GPCRs or other difficult targets.
Attovia aims to "fine-tune" antibody components to make more selective medicines, Fu said.
Essentially, Attovia will use nanobodies, or small antibody fragments, to create drugs that can bind closely to multiple sites on the same target. The company envisions these “biparatropic nanobodies” as the foundation for several different types of therapies, like antibody-drug conjugates, radioconjugates or multi-specific antibodies. It also claims to have technology that can discover these nanobodies more quickly.
“From target identification to actually getting a potential lead, it's a four-to-five month process,” Fu said. “We can really accelerate the clock of the development timeline using this technology.”
Fu spent nearly a decade overseeing M&A for Johnson & Johnson, and then Bristol Myers Squibb before jumping into biotech and, most recently, joining Frazier.
Attovia’s Series A round was led by Frazier, with participation from venBio and Illumina Ventures. Its approach has parallels to another venBio investment, Acelyrin, which in May raised what is currently the largest initial public offering of 2023.
“Small format nanobodies have demonstrated recent success in delivering best-in-class efficacy in select immune-mediated diseases as evidenced by Acelyrin, one of our early investments,” said Aaron Royston, a managing partner at venBio who sits on Attovia’s board of directors, in a statement.
Acelyrin’s lead candidate, izokibep, targets an immune system-regulating protein and is “designed to overcome the limitations of monoclonal antibodies,” the company said. Attovia is attempting something similar with its envisioned drug candidates.
“There has been progress in the field in the last 10 years,” Fu said. “We’re really hoping that Attovia and our technology continues to contribute to them.”