ALLOX closes $10.5M seed financing to scale drug discovery platform

Biotechnology firm ALLOX has secured $10.5 million in seed funding to bolster its drug discovery platform and pursue internal development initiatives. The investment round was spearheaded by Asabys via the Sabadell Asabys II fund, with backing from CDTI through SICC Innvierte and the Institut Català de Finances (ICF). ALLOX has been working on a drug discovery platform that integrates high-throughput genetics, experimental biology, and artificial intelligence to uncover novel opportunities for creating small-molecule therapeutics.

The process of drug discovery is challenging for certain biological targets, especially protein-protein interactions and transcription factors, which have proven difficult to tackle using traditional methods. To address these limitations, ALLOX aims to pinpoint regulatory regions within proteins that could function as potential targets for new treatments.

The company's platform assesses the impact of thousands of genetic mutations simultaneously to map regions that impact protein folding and interactions. This methodology allows for the discovery of allosteric, orthosteric, and other regulatory sites, as well as possible binding pockets that could be harnessed to develop targeted small-molecule drugs.

Júlia Domingo, ALLOX's CEO and co-founder, stated that by merging extensive functional data with predictive AI, the company intends to broaden the scope of difficult drug targets and expedite the development of distinctive small-molecule therapeutics. Concurrently with the funding announcement, ALLOX has appointed Morten Graugaard as an Independent Chair of its Board of Directors.

Graugaard boasts over two decades of experience in life sciences investment, R&D, and business development, having held key roles at Orbis Medicines, Novo Holdings, and Lundbeck. Graugaard expressed his appreciation for ALLOX's approach to drug discovery, which merges experimental biology with computational techniques to identify therapeutic opportunities that have traditionally been challenging to address.

He emphasized that ALLOX addresses a crucial data gap, facilitating the creation of functional molecules instead of merely identifying binders. The new funding will be utilized to expand the platform's capabilities, develop proprietary AI models to predict therapeutic opportunities from vast biophysical datasets, strengthen its internal drug discovery team, advance multiple research programs toward a pipeline of proprietary small-molecule drug candidates, and establish research collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners.