Seattle-based biotech research startup A-Alpha Bio announced on Thursday that it has received an $800,000 grant from the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. The money will support drug research for treating infectious diseases, including respiratory viruses such as the novel coronavirus as well as intestinal pathogens.
The project is being done in partnership with Lumen Bioscience, a Seattle company developing antibodies taken orally that treat gastrointestinal tract diseases.
The research will study interactions between antibodies and pathogens, including SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, as well as mutants of the virus and other coronaviruses. On the intestinal front, the scientists are working on campylobacter, one of the main four bacteria that causes diarrheal disease worldwide.
The project will use A-Alpha Bio’s proprietary AlphaSeq platform, which allows researchers to measure the ability of antibodies to bind to multiple targets on a pathogen at the same time. This is important given that small differences or mutations in a virus or bacteria can deflect a drug that is narrowly targeted, rendering it ineffective.
The Gates Foundation previously funded a pilot study that demonstrated the ability of the AlphaSeq platform to successfully screen multi-target antibodies. In this next phase, researchers will use the platform’s data to train machine learning models that can be used to create drugs to treat respiratory and intestinal diseases.
“Our strategy is to partner with pharmaceutical companies and work together to discover and optimize therapeutics,” said David Younger, co-founder and CEO of A-Alpha Bio, by email. “While we do not provide contract research testing services, we are absolutely interested in connecting with companies working on COVID-19 antibodies and discussing how we can work together.”
David Younger and Randolph Lopez founded A-Alpha Bio in 2017 to commercialize the platform they invented while they were graduate researchers at University of Washington. Last year, the startup raised $2.8 million in seed funding to support the development of AlphaSeq.
