NEW YORK – Biotech firm Protillion Biosciences said Monday it has closed an $18 million Series A financing round funded by Arch Venture Partners and Illumina Ventures.
The Burlingame, California-based company said it will use the funds to drive development of its technology for identifying and optimizing new protein therapeutics. The technology can characterize the binding affinity of around 1 million antibody variants in two-day automated experiments, according to the firm, providing antibody binding information with amino acid-level resolution at high throughput.
Protillion is a spinout from the lab of Stanford University researcher and company cofounder William Greenleaf. The firm's other cofounders include CEO Curtis Layton, previously a postdoc in Greenleaf's lab, and David Walt, a core faculty member at the Wyss Institute and a scientific founder of Illumina and Quanterix. Walt will serve on the company's board of directors.
"For the first time, quantitative binding measurements for millions of biologic candidates can be seen upfront, and big data is available much earlier in the discovery process," Layton said in a statement. "Our mission is to find better medicines via transformative technology that enables us to identify the best therapeutic molecules every time."
"Protillion's technology enables exquisite exploration of protein sequence space, facilitating a generational shift in high-throughput protein discovery," Sean Kendall, partner at Arch, said in a statement. "It bridges key gaps between computational methods and real-world performance, opening the door to the rapid development of novel and truly optimized biologics."