Terrain Biosciences launches from stealth as the world’s first RNA design-build company, using advanced AI and its proprietary manufacturing platform to accelerate development of the next generation of programmable medicines. RNA-based modalities, including mRNA, cell & gene therapies, and emerging personalized cancer vaccines are promising and rapidly advancing, with hundreds of drug candidates in development for indications ranging from oncology to infectious disease to neurodegenerative illnesses. Despite incredible progress, innovators in the space continue to face challenges in designing, selecting, manufacturing, and delivering optimal customized RNA sequences for therapeutic benefit.
Founded by Professors Omar Abudayyeh and Jonathan Gootenberg of Harvard Medical School and Professor Patrick Hsu of the Arc Institute and University of California, Berkeley, the company is led by industry veterans including CSO Aaron Larsen (formerly at Beam & Moderna), COO Ted Tisch (formerly at Mammoth Biosciences and Synthego), and founding CEO Chetan Tadvalkar (veteran GM/COO of pharma services companies, including former head of business operations at Ginkgo Bioworks). Terrain has raised $9M in seed funding to bring cutting-edge research in RNA design and manufacturing to innovators building RNA-based therapies and vaccines, and support development of personalized cancer vaccines. Over a dozen biotechs already trust Terrain Bio to help them identify and produce sequences with better expression, greater durability, and optimal manufacturability, accelerating their path to the clinic.
Also Read: Cosette Pharmaceuticals Names Vincent Colicchio as SVP
“AI is poised to dramatically accelerate how we design and develop drugs, but the reality is that in silico models can only get us so far in RNA — bringing a drug from the lab to the clinic requires bringing advanced science into the real world. Our partners need excellent machine learning tools combined with a real manufacturing platform and data to enable and accelerate their path to the clinic,” said Terrain co-founder Omar Abudayyeh.
“Our partners are brilliant scientists on an incredibly challenging journey to develop new medicines and ultimately help patients,” said Chetan Tadvalkar, CEO of Terrain. “Our team has been part of similar journeys before, and today our purpose is to help scientists navigate the complexity of designing the right RNA sequence and guide them towards their goal while ensuring they hit key preclinical milestones.”
RNA optimization is critical for therapeutic efficacy and safety — sequence and purity reaches beyond the mechanism of action to have broad impacts across expression, stability, durability, immunogenicity, and manufacturability. “The search space for designing RNA is nearly infinite,” said co-founder Jonathan Gootenberg. “Navigating that space computationally and experimentally will unlock enormous potential in medicine, but remains incredibly challenging given the lack of top-quality data for training better models.”
“Bridging design and manufacturing in a tight feedback loop means higher quality preclinical data, which means stronger generative models for design, which means better drug candidates,” said co-founder Patrick Hsu. “Terrain is all about making the tools for this kind of rapid iteration possible for delivering better RNA.”
Source: PRNewswire