Diagonal Therapeutics utilizes a proprietary platform that combines computational and experimental techniques to rapidly identify and produce agonist antibodies that activate specific receptor complexes. This approach addresses the challenge of developing therapies for debilitating diseases by reactivating critical biological pathways, offering potential treatments for conditions like hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia and pulmonary arterial hypertension.
Funding
$128M raised to dateRaised to date based on public sources. This may differ from the amount the company actually raised and is based only on what is publicly available on the internet.
BVFounders
Product
Problem
Traditional antibody therapies primarily focus on inhibiting cellular functions, while many diseases require the activation of specific biological pathways to restore normal function. Identifying agonist antibodies that can selectively activate these pathways is challenging due to the vast number of potential binding combinations and the difficulty in predicting which combinations will result in the desired agonistic activity.
Solution
Diagonal Therapeutics utilizes a platform combining computational and experimental techniques to rapidly discover and develop agonist antibodies. The platform generates deep immune repertoires of antibody sequences, predicts antibody shapes using computational methods, and groups sequences by their binding spots on receptors. This enables the generation of multi-specific antibodies that are produced for experimental testing. Once an agonistic combination is identified, the platform optimizes molecular sequence characteristics and characterizes the antibodies in in vitro and in vivo models, leading to clinical candidate selection.
Target Audience
Diagonal Therapeutics' primary target audience includes pharmaceutical companies and research institutions focused on developing novel antibody therapies for diseases requiring pathway activation, particularly in areas with unmet medical needs such as hereditary hemorrhagic telangiectasia (HHT) and pulmonary arterial hypertension (PAH).
Features
- Generation of immune repertoires containing approximately 200,000 distinct antibody sequences to cover all possible binding sites on each receptor.
- Computational prediction and clustering of antibody shapes to eliminate redundancies.
- Grouping of distinctly shaped sequences by their unique binding spots on the receptors.
- Combination of representative binders from each group into a multi-specific antibody for experimental testing.
- Optimization of molecular sequence characteristics to identify molecules with the best characteristics.
- Characterization of antibodies in in vitro and in vivo models to derive optimal agonists.