II: TechBio Weekly News
Latest Trends: General Proximity and Merck’s KGaA Germany TechBio/AI Drug Discovery Landscape
✴️ I: TechBio Weekly News
✴️ II: TechBio Weekly News
Latest Trends: 💈 General Proximity and 💈 Merck’s KGaA Germany TechBio/AI Drug Discovery Landscape
✴️ III: TechBio Weekly News
“A good friend will always stab you in the front.”
By Oscar Wilde
✴️ II: TechBio Weekly News
💈 General Proximity
On January 3, 2025, a San Francisco-based biotech platform, General Proximity, announced its emergence from stealth unveiling its proprietary OmniTAC platform (the first generalized, mechanism-agnostic, proximity discovery engine) designed to pioneer the next generation of induced proximity medicines. The company raised $16M to accelerate the development of treatments targeting undruggable proteins associated with cancer, cardiometabolic disease, neurodegeneration and longevity (General Proximity De-Stealths with $16M to Pioneer Next-Gen Induced Proximity Medicines for 'Undruggable' Targets).
The oversubscribed seed round was led by Aydin Senkut, founder and managing partner at Felicis, a firm renowned for backing biotech trailblazers such as Recursion, Ginkgo Bioworks and BioAge. Other notable investors include Y Combinator, age1, Modi Ventures, Wilson Sonsini, as well as a number of prestigious angel investors including Jeff Dean (Head of Google AI), Uri Lopatin (Khosla, YC, Pardes), Ben Mann (Co-Author GPT-3, Co-Founder Anthropic), Alec Nielsen (CEO Asimov), Trevor Martin (CEO Mammoth), Juan Benet (Founder Filecoin), Nish Bhat (Co-Founder Color Health), Jim Dahl (Rock Creek Capital), and De Thompson V (Legends Capital).
General Proximity is developing its proprietary OmniTAC platform to model the precise and selective modification of disease-driving proteins and create therapeutic opportunities for traditionally undruggable targets. Regarding these undruggable targets, our genome codes for thousands of intricate molecular machines—the effector proteins—which regulate all aspects of biology and include chaperone, adaptor proteins and trafficking proteins, all post-translational modification (PTM) readers/writers/erasers and many others. Combined, these effector proteins comprise the ‘effectome’: the set of all proteins which modulate other proteins to control biology.
For example, most PTMs such as phosphorylation, methylation and acetylation promote proximity of molecules to play deterministic roles in cellular processes. Proximity, or the physical closeness of molecules, is a master regulator of biology. Basically, all biological processes are controlled through proximity on some level. Interactions or ‘proximity events’ between ‘target’ and ‘effector proteins’ can result in a vast constellation of downstream biology on a target protein—activation, refolding, re-localization, re-programming, functional modulation, degradation, etc.
Manipulation of a given protein’s proximity topology thus enables nearly arbitrary control of that protein's function and biology. And here is where the OmniTAC platform can be handy. General Proximity’s unbiased effector discovery platform allows them to discover the most powerful proximity mechanisms for a given target, enabling the development of highly-efficacious proximity therapeutics for targets previously beyond the reach of medicine.
The company is the brainchild of Armand B. Cognetta III, PhD, a veteran of renowned chemical biologist Benjamin Cravatt's research group. Furthermore, the founding team behind General Proximity includes an array of top scientists from institutions such as Scripps Research Institute, the Broad Institute of Harvard/MIT, Yale, Oxford, Cambridge, UPenn, Johns Hopkins, Columbia and UCSF, with deep experience from top pharmaceutical companies (Novartis, Merck, GSK, Genentech, Roche and Alnylam), as well as multiple veterans from the labs of induced proximity pioneers Craig Crews and Amit Choudhary.
On top of that, General Proximity has assembled a world-class Scientific & Strategic Advisory Board featuring key opinion leaders from top biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies such as Martin Babler (Genentech, Principia, Alumis), Lawrence Hamann (Bristol-Myers Squibb, Novartis, Celgene, Takeda, Interdict), and Andy Crew (Astellas, Arvinas, Siduma) alongside a number of academic experts in cancer biology and neurodegeneration.