Flagship-backed start-up aims to make oral biologics

Flagship Pioneering, the venture firm behind Moderna and a slew of other biotech start-ups, is making a foray into synthetic biology. The new firm’s name, Abiologics, is a play on “not biologics”—or, more accurately, “not biologics, exactly,” as cofounder and CEO Avak Kahvejian describes the company’s drug candidates.

“Protein-based drugs are exceptionally valuable . . . but we also know that they have certain drawbacks,” Kahvejian says. “They’re not orally bioavailable. They have to be injected or infused. They may be immunogenic if you use them at too high a concentration or too frequently. They don’t get in certain nooks and crannies in the body.”

Some of those limitations have been overcome with the use of nonstandard amino acids, such as those that are chemically modified after they’ve been incorporated into a protein. Kahvejian and his team have developed generative artificial intelligence software that designs proteins using D-amino acids, which are mirror images of standard L-amino acids. Abiologics pieces together D-amino acids into “synteins,” short for synthetic proteins, that are designed to be incredibly stable, last longer inside the body than current biologics tend to, and—crucially—be orally bioavailable, meaning they could be taken as a pill rather than through an injection or infusion.

The mirror image amino acids could, in theory, also allow for a more scalable manufacturing process than the recombinant technologies scientists rely on to make traditional biologics. The platform Abiologics uses is built on the work of cofounder Bradley Pentelute of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, a leader in synthetic protein synthesis whose work also underpins the start-up Amide Technologies.

“We’ve accomplished the generative AI component to design synteins,” Kahvejian says. “We’ve built the chemical synthesis platform to make the synteins. And we’ve also tested them downstream in a number of biochemical and in vivo assays.”

Abiologics currently consists of a 20-person team split between Flagship Pioneering’s offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and a shared laboratory space called Southline across the Charles River in Boston. The start-up is backed entirely by Flagship, which has committed $50 million to the effort; the venture firm recently raised $3.6 billion to launch 25 new start-ups over the next 3 to 5 years and establish external partnerships.

Kahvejian believes synteins as medicines have potential applications in solid-tumor cancers and central nervous system disorders, although he declined to name any specific clinical development timelines.

“It’s like being in the early days of antibodies as a new modality or mRNA as a new modality or small RNA as a new modality,” Kahvejian says. “Synteins are a new class, a new modality, that have advantaged pharmacological properties, and we now have the ability to create them.”