Harvard’s serial entrepreneur Timothy Springer has formally launched his latest venture with a $101m series A round backed by GV.
Seismic Therapeutic, a US-based immunotherapy discovery technology developer, formally launched on Wednesday with $101m in series A funding from investors including co-founder Timothy Springer, a professor at Harvard University’s Medical School.
Venture capital firm Lightspeed Venture Partners led the round, which also featured internet technology group Alphabet’s GV unit, Boxer Capital, Polaris Partners, Samsara BioCapital as well as Seismic’s other co-founders and management team.
Seismic has built a machine learning-equipped biologics development platform dubbed Impact, which incorporates structural biology, protein engineering and translational immunology to help drug developers accelerate the process of discovering therapeutic targets for autoimmune disease.
The company will use the money to take its two lead drug candidates, which target antibody and cell-mediated autoimmunity respectively, toward clinical trials and improve Impact’s machine learning capabilities.
Jo Viney, co-founder, president and chief executive of Seismic Therapeutic, said: “The time is right to move the needle in immunology, as advances in technology now enable us to discover medicines to address complex immune system biology in dramatically improved ways.
“We are leading the next generation of immunology drug development with Seismic’s platform. By integrating machine learning throughout the biologics drug discovery process, we are powered by a systematic and programmable approach to design superior biologics from initial discovery and therapeutic design through to manufacturability.”
Springer and Debora Marks, also a professor at Harvard Medical School, are the “main” scientific co-founders of Seismic, according to Fierce Biotech, but the company also builds on research from Harvard’s Andrew Kruse, Rockefeller University’s Jeffrey Ravetch and Emory University’s Eric Sundberg.
Seismic is the latest venture for Springer, whose most successful companies to date have arguably been mRNA vaccine developer Moderna and gene-editing company Editas. His portfolio also includes biotech developer Tectonic Therapeutic and integrin drug developer Morphic Holding.
Viney and Alan Crane, another co-founder of Seismic, meanwhile are no strangers to successfully commercialising Harvard research: the pair previously teamed up with the university’s David Sachs to launch Pandion Therapeutics. The autoimmune and inflammatory diseases-focused company was acquired by pharmaceutical company Merck & Co for nearly $1.9bn in February 2021.
Springer said: “Biologics drug development has undergone extraordinary advances in recent years, and the advent of machine learning working in concert with structural biology and protein engineering offers an entirely new trajectory for creating innovative biologics medicines.
“Seismic is taking a major leap forward by fully integrating machine learning throughout the biologics drug development process, whereas earlier efforts to date have generally used machine learning in a much less integrated way.”
– Photograph of Harvard University courtesy of the institution. A version of this article first appeared on our sister site, Global Corporate Venturing.
