USA – New Equilibrium Biosciences, a Cambridge, Mass.-based company that advances a rational drug design against intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs), closed a $10m in seed funding.
RA Capital Management made the investment. New Equilibrium previously closed $350k in grants from the National Science Foundation and Massachusetts Life Sciences Center, as well as a $250k pre-seed from the Petri Life Sciences Incubator in Boston. Petri committed an additional $500,000 to the $10m seed.The company intends to use the funds to scale up R&D facility, expand the team, and accelerate programs targeting IDPs while exploring strategic partnerships.Led by Dr. Virginia Burger, Founder and CEO, New Equilibrium provides a platform that reveals opportunities for structure-based design by learning biophysics with AI. NEQ’s platform combines AI and biophysics to reveal experimentally-invisible conformations of shapeshifting proteins. This technology enables the rational design of drugs targeting the elusive class of intrinsically disordered proteins, including many of the most desirable targets for cancer, neurodegeneration, and other indications. Prior to founding New Equilibrium in 2019, Dr. Burger led scientific collaborations at the AI drug discovery company XtalPi and performed postdoctoral research in IDP biophysics at MIT. Her co-founder, Dr. Peter Tompa, Chair of the Scientific Advisory Board, is a Professor of Biochemistry at the Flanders Institute for Biotechnology (VIB) who has spearheaded research on the relationship between IDP structure and function since the field emerged. RA Capital’s Entrepreneur-in-Residence and Head of Computational Chemistry, Dr. Soumya Ray—previously at Schrödinger—will join New Equilibrium as Chief Technology Officer.05/04/2021
