Absci

Absci operates SoluPro, a protein discovery and printing platform for designing soluble complex proteins and cell lines in a single efficient process. The company’s Integrated Drug Creation platform is designed to identify novel drug targets and create biotherapeutic candidates efficiently. The company claims this approach reduces the drug discovery and development timelines from years to weeks. 

As of March 2024, the company’s pipeline includes three preclinical candidates, namely: 1) ABS-101 to treat inflammatory bowel disease, 2) ABS-201 to treat dermatology conditions, and 3) ABS-301, an immuno-oncology candidate.

The company has acquired a couple of companies in order to speed up the drug development process by enabling in Silico (computer-simulated) protein designing and optimization. The acquisitions included: 1) AI startup Denovium Inc. (January 2021), to leverage the latter’s capabilities in drug discovery and cell line development and integrate Denovium’s AI-based platform, which is capable of interpreting and predicting the behavior of proteins, with its Protein Printing platform; 2) Totient Inc. (June 2021), to leverage its target discovery capabilities and target antigen library for therapeutic protein design and training sets for deep learning models. 

Previously based in Washington, AbSci shifted to Vancouver in 2016. The 170-person company also has offices in Cambridge, Massachusetts, and Serbia and staff in the UK.

Key customers and partnerships

Absci’s customers include leading pharma companies, including EQRX (October 2021),  Merck (January 2022), an undisclosed stealth-mode biotech company (July 2022), and M2GEN (April 2023), Almirall (November 2023), and AstraZeneca (December 2023). 

In August 2023, the company entered a collaboration with California Institute of Technology (Caltech) , backed by a grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation (amount undisclosed) to discover an affordable HIV vaccine. In December 2023, the company partnered with PrecisionLife to develop a portfolio of potential AI-therapeutic treatments. 

Funding and financials

In March 2024 , the company raised  approximately USD 86.4 million in an underwritten public offering to advance its in-house asset programs and trademark its platform. For FY 2023, it reported a revenue of USD 5.7 million.