Seattle-based Cyrus Biotechnology is entering a protein engineering collaboration with Boston-based Selecta Biosciences that could pull in up to $1.5 billion for the University of Washington spinout. The partnership will support the development of new agents for immune-related conditions, the companies announced this week.
The partnership includes an undisclosed up-front payment and is worth up to $1.5 billion for Cyrus — if the deal hits certain drug discovery, development and sales milestones.
The partnership’s lead program will combine an immune modulating agent developed by Selecta with a protein called IL-2, being engineered by Cyrus. Cyrus is enhancing IL-2 through its protein engineering software and through testing at the laboratory bench.
Cyrus can engineer therapeutic proteins with properties such as greater stability in the body, using its software tools originating from the UW’s Institute for Protein Design.
The new partnership adds to several other multi-year deals in progress for Cyrus. These include an ongoing collaboration with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard to optimize gene editing techniques based on CRISPR. Cyrus also sells its protein design software, Cyrus Bench, to 33 customers including large pharma companies.
“Our goal is to be the premier partner for computational protein engineering of novel drugs,” CEO Lucas Nivon said in an email to GeekWire. Under the new collaboration Cyrus will engineer IL-2 to be combined with Selecta’s immune-modulating agent, called ImmTOR.
IL-2 is known to enhance the action of immune cells in the body called regulatory T cells, which can quell an overactive immune system and ease symptoms of autoimmune diseases. Combining IL-2 with ImmTOR bumps up the numbers of these cells in preclinical experiments.
Two other projects are also on deck as part of the collaboration. Those projects also will involve combining engineered proteins with ImmTOR.
“This collaboration is in perfect alignment with our protein design expertise,” Nivon in a statement. “With our current partners, we have demonstrated our ability to redesign existing protein biologics or build them from the ground-up.”
Cyrus is just one of several spinouts from the IPD that leverage software-based drug discovery tools, an area that is gaining increasing investor attention.
Just this week, IPD spinout A-Alpha Bio raised $20 million for its protein-discovery platform. And in July vaccine startup Icosavax went public in an IPO that raised more than $180 million.
