Biotech and artificial intelligence startup Swing is finding success with its genetic approach to protein design, landing major customers and a massive new investment of $24 million.
The company came out of stealth a little over a year ago, just as the hype surrounding the big language models was starting to heat up. Many AI companies train biotechnology models to intrinsically understand molecular structure. Cradle’s insight was that the long sequences of amino acids that make up the proteins in our bodies are akin to “like a foreign programming language.”
It might not be possible for a person to learn this language, but an AI model could – and a person could work with it. While they couldn’t just say “make a protein that does this,” they could ask which of the 100 interesting proteins seemed most likely to survive at room temperature or in an acidic environment.
The approach appears to have caught the eye of major drug development companies such as Johnson & Johnson and Novozymes. Creating a useful and functional protein from scratch is generally a fairly complex process, taking perhaps years and hundreds or thousands of wet-lab experiments.
Cradle says its technology can significantly reduce that time and the number of experiments required. While he didn’t actually substantiate the claims of cutting development time in half, he did provide an illustrative example from his internal development.
They used their software to produce alternative versions of T7 RNA polymerase, an RNA-making enzyme, that would be more resistant to high temperatures. Normally, they said, a team might expect less than 5 percent of intentionally modified molecules to have the desired fold, but 70 percent of the Cradle-produced variants showed increased stability. This is equivalent to running four or five such experimental series in one.
In addition to T7, Cradle is working internally on “a dehalogenase that can be used to disinfect soil, a growth factor that promotes growth through cell division commonly used in meat culture products, a transaminase that regulates metabolic pathways, and helps to understand certain diseases also as a therapeutic antibody,” said Cradle CEO and co-founder Stef van Grieken in an email to TechCrunch. “We have benchmarked our models against an in-house protein engineer using existing tools, and we see significant improvement in designs based on Generative AI.”
(That’s it, in case you’re wondering 🙂
Image Credits: Swing
Such large improvements are possible, and small, even fractional improvements would be welcomed by the companies that invest millions in these processes. But of course there is more to the drug development process than generating potential candidate molecules.
“We have already been able to demonstrate the capabilities of our platform to accelerate the R&D phase and help our partners bring bio-based products to market faster and more cost-effectively,” said van Grieken. “In fact, as we and several collaborators have completed several rounds of experimentation on our platform, we see models generalizing very well to different types of proteins and tasks, which is incredibly exciting.”
The technology is by no means limited to drug development and could also be used in food and industrial applications. As with other tools of this type, part of the draw for customers is that Cradle doesn’t require a machine learning engineer to operate, but can be put directly into the hands of scientists and labs.
I asked van Grieken his thoughts on building an EU-based biotech company, with many on the team having previously worked at large tech companies in Silicon Valley.
“We found that building in the EU has advantages and disadvantages. Raising capital for a deep-tech venture in Europe is more complicated in Europe than in the US, where there are far more modern “tech-bio” investors interested in companies like Cradle. There is also a much larger community of like-minded founders in the Bay Area,” he said.
“However, in terms of talent I think Europe is underrated,” van Grieken continued. “For example, here in Zurich, you have all the big tech companies (Apple, Google, Facebook) represented with thousands of engineers. You have a fantastic talent pool from ETH and EPFL, which are some of the best universities for computer science and molecular biology in the world. And the competition for talent is certainly less intense than in the Bay Area. Finally, many of the world’s largest pharmaceutical and biotech companies are located in Europe, so we are close to our customers. I definitely believe that the European ecosystem is growing fast.”
Cradle’s $24 million A round follows a $5.5 million round last year. Previous investor Index Ventures led the round, with Kindred Capital (also a lead investor) participating, along with individual investors Chris Gibson, Tom Glocer and others. The company says it will use the capital to grow its team and sales, just like you.
