Welsh startup Antiverse raises $2m for antibody discovery toolkit

New biotech Antiverse has raised seed funding of £1.4 million ($2 million) to develop its artificial intelligence-based platform for discovering therapeutic antibodies. The Cardiff, Wales startup is combining machine learning and phage display techniques to model antibody-antigen binding and says it can cut the time it takes to develop a drug candidate. It's one of the few AI drug discovery companies operating in the antibody category, as most are focused on small molecules. Antiverse – which was co-founded in 2017 by engineers Murat Tunaboylu and Ben Holland – says it will use the cash injection to build a new laboratory in Cardiff and expand its technical team through recruitment of specialist machine learning engineers, laboratory scientists and structural biologists. Antiverse's platform uses next generation sequencing and AI to provide diverse antibody candidates for any given target, according to the company, which reckons its approach is quicker than existing antibody discovery methods which are effective but can be limited and costly.