CerraCap Ventures, a leading early-stage Venture Fund, today announced the acquisition of its portfolio company Totient by Absci for an undisclosed amount. The transaction is the second exit from CerraCap’s investment fund, CerraCap II LP.
Totient is an artificial intelligence-driven drug discovery platform that identifies and harnesses human immune responses to identify novel antibodies and their therapeutic targets. Absci is a synthetic biology company unlocking the potential of proteins as next-generation therapeutics. This acquisition adds antibody and target discovery technology to Absci’s platform for therapeutic protein design and biomanufacturing optimization.
To date, Totient has reconstructed more than 4,500 antibodies from over 50,000 patients and has de-orphaned a collection of promising antibodies by identifying and validating their target antigens. Absci’s high-throughput single-cell protein expression systems and assays offer a platform for rapidly and systematically de-orphaning the computationally derived antibody sequences in Totient’s growing library.
Both Totient and Absci share a vision to change the world by making the best medicine available to mankind. This acquisition is well-aligned to build a deep library of natural human antibodies and target antigens that can be validated as new opportunities for drug development.
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“We are delighted to see Totient’s platform, and their talented R&D team becoming a part of Absci. This acquisition demonstrates the success of CerraCap’s ‘Sales and Scale™’ model,” said Saurabh Ranjan, Founder, and CEO, CerraCap Ventures.
“This highly complementary acquisition will significantly accelerate the pipeline created by Totient. We look forward to the combined team’s continued successes as they work to create breakthrough products,” added Vikas Datt, Partner CerraCap Ventures.
“Totient’s innovative work identifying disease-relevant molecules has exciting therapeutic potential,” commented Sean McClain, founder, and CEO of Absci. “We believe that the combination of the Totient technology with Absci’s platform, including our Denovium AI, provides us the framework and data to enable in silico targeted drug design, and ultimately achieve our goals of making the best medicines available to patients in need.”
“Together, Absci and Totient are much more than the sum of our parts, with clear opportunities for synergy of our platforms and technologies,” said Deniz Kural, Ph.D., co-founder, and CEO of Totient. “Our computational biology technology allows us to identify thousands of new antibodies and other categories of proteins, and with Absci, we look forward to scaling our target discovery capabilities to comprehensively de-orphan antibodies and validate new opportunities for drug development.”
Source: Biospace
