Scientific advances are accelerating the pace of new drug development. Tierra Bioscience believes the pace could be even faster.
The San Leandro-based company has developed an AI-guided custom protein synthesis platform to help pharmaceutical, industrial, and agricultural organizations develop new proteins in weeks instead of months.
Simply put, Tierra allows customers to order proteins online that can make everything from antibodies to food growth factors. This platform creates cell-free reagents or digital arrays of proteins. Tierra creates her DNA, the code for proteins. That reagent is combined with the customer's protein sequence and fed into a robotic platform to create the protein.
“Once that protein goes through the process, it starts generating a lot of data,” Tierra CEO Michael Nemzek told TechCrunch. “We consider all the different parameters of the protein, such as stability and solubility, and put that in front of a closed feedback loop.”
Organizations traditionally use living cells to develop new proteins, but Nemzek says this is slow, inefficient, and dependent on poor data. Tierra instead uses cell-free technology, which shortens delivery times from months to weeks and allows customers to know if their protein works. For example, if a customer makes enzymes for laundry detergent, Tierra incorporates that into a large-scale, AI-powered language model. This will output data about whether the existing sequence works or if it needs to be changed. According to Nemzek, it saves time and money in the live cell development process because customers get a complete picture of the protein before doing any iterations.
“People making proteins today have to order DNA and then cut up living cells. And there's a lot of work to do to keep the cells alive,” Nemzek said. “We provide a very high-throughput method of producing proteins. If you need 100 proteins to validate an AI model, you can do it within a few weeks. You can’t do it yourself without spending a lot of money.”
Tierra's AI data model grows with each protein created, and the company has created over 5,000 proteins to date. But there is an infinite amount of protein that can be made in the world, Nemzek says.
We introduced Tierra Biosciences, which rebranded from Synvitrobio in 2018 and raised $2.6 million in new funding. Since then, the company has continued to secure his $7.2 million in grants from prominent government agencies, including the Energy Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Institutes of Health, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.
Tierra Bioscience's Protein Manufacturing Laboratory. (Image credit: Tierra Biosciences)
Additionally, in 2022, Mr. Nemzek was appointed CEO. He succeeds co-founder Zachary Sun, who currently serves as chief scientific officer. Prior to joining the company, Nemzek served as Chief Commercial Officer of Synthego Corp., where he led the commercial expansion and growth of CRISPR's genome engineering business.
Now, with $11.4 million in new Series A funding, Nemzek is steering Tierra toward commercialization. The investment was made by Adam Sharkawy (who was a deal maker at The Medicine before Novartis acquired the company in 2020) and Carmichael Roberts (who works at the climate fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures). The project is being led by Material Impact, a fund co-founded by (known for) and supported by stakeholders. billionaire). New and existing investors participated in the round, including Prosus Ventures, In-Q-Tel (IQT), Hillspire, Freeflow Ventures, Creative Ventures, and Social Capital.
Tierra already has relationships with several major pharmaceutical, industrial and agricultural organizations. The company plans to use the new funding to expand to a wider range of customers and partners and further build out its AI data generation capabilities. The company also plans to hire a commercial team to help it demonstrate more aggressive sales growth since launching the platform about a year ago.
Some customers have also expressed interest in new industry-specific cell-free systems that don't yet exist, Nemzek said. Tierra is working on this as well as increasing the amount of protein it can produce. Currently, he is able to produce milligrams for customers to experiment with, and within the next month or two he plans to scale up to 1 gram units suitable for his pilot program.
“Do we believe that cell-free technology will solve every protein problem? No, but it will solve about 80% of the curve,” Nemzek said. “If you're trying to design a new protein that does something you're interested in, you can go beyond nature and use Tierra's predictive power to develop protein function.”