Early-stage companies — RubrYc Therapeutics
Tags: Venture Capital, Biotechnology, Investing, Healthcare, Medicine

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Who leads RubrYc?

RubrYc Therapeutics was founded in 2017 by Isaac Bright (CEO), Matthew Greving (CTO), and Mohan Srinivasan after spinning out of HealthTell (develops immune profiling assays) to use the company’s peptide array synthesis technology to form the basis of RubrYc’s business to develop new antibody medicines.

What does RubrYc do?

RubrYc discovers epitope-selective antibodies. The company’s platform, Discovery Engine, is centered around photolithographic synthesis of peptide arrays. This platform enables RubrYc to manufacture meso-scale engineered molecules (MEM), which are scaffolds meant to present an epitope in its natural conformation. The idea is that screening antibodies in vitro against MEMs can more easily discover antibodies that recognize an epitope in vivo.

RubrYc’s platform has 4 advantages in antibody discovery:

Expand the complementary determining region (CDR) diversity of antibodies against known and relevant epitopes Develop antibodies against challenging epitopes In particular, enable antibodies to be discovered for discontinuous or junctional epitopes More easily identify and avoid antibody off-target binding (i.e. avoid antigen sinks)

WIth the ability to generate unique libraries of antibodies, the company uses machine learning to discover epitope-selective antibodies in oncology and autoimmunity with certain features: better pharmacodynamic properties, stronger epitope binding, targeting natural versus alternative epitopes, safety/off-target binding.

What makes RubrYc unique?

RubrYc’s ability to create MEM arrays with over 3M peptides is a major advantage to discover antibodies selective for one target and not for others. This lowers the cost of discovery as well as ensures broad coverage across epitopes. By unifying this peptide array synthesis capability with machine learning, protein dynamic simulations, and high-throughput screening, the company has the power to discover antibodies against a diverse set of epitopes from linear to conformational and junctional.

Why I like what RubrYc is doing?

RubrYc has used its unique antibody discovery platform to build a diverse, preclinical pipeline of medicines as well as set themselves up to forge co-development and discovery partnerships. The company’s lead asset, RTX-003, is an anti-CD25 antibody to activate antibody-dependent cellular cytotoxicity (ADCC) in regulatory T-cells (Treg) in oncology. Their second asset, RTX-002, is a PD-1 agonist antibody for autoimmunity (SLE and MS).

The company is focusing on developing epitope-specific antibodies focused on T-cells. Overtime, the company is looking to expand beyond monoclonal antibodies (mAb) fto epitope-specific antibody–drug conjugates (ADC), bispecifics, and chimeric antigen receptors (CAR).

You can find RubrYc here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pU1qqxXUJXY