Biotech startup Mana.bio raises $19.5 million Seed to accelerate programmable drug delivery
Biotech startup Mana.bio raises $19.5 million Seed to accelerate programmable drug delivery
The company, co-founded by Yogev Debbi, Roy Nevo, Avi Schroeder, and Kira Radinsky, unveiled its AI-based lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery platform to accelerate the development of nucleic acid-based therapeutics and vaccines
Mana.bio, a biotechnology company which develops solutions to accelerate programmable drug delivery, has announced that it has raised $19.5 million Seed financing co-led by Andreessen Horowitz Bio + Health, Base4 Capital, NFX, LionBird and the Technion. Mana also unveiled its AI-based lipid nanoparticle (LNP) delivery platform to accelerate the development of nucleic acid-based therapeutics and vaccines.
The company’s purpose-built AI LNP platform aims to effectively deliver RNA and gene therapies to specific extrahepatic tissues in the body, which could potentially result in new therapies across a wide range of unmet needs. Mana.bio's unique approach, which is based on academic research from the Technion Institute of Technology, cycles through design, build, test and learn steps that are enabled by artificial intelligence, allowing the company to rapidly innovate and optimize LNPs for targeted delivery of RNA therapies.
Mana’s co-founders include Yogev Debbi (CEO), who previously served as COO of Genome Compiler, a software gene editing company acquired by Twist Bioscience. He then led Twist's Israel R&D center through its IPO. Roy Nevo (CTO), who previously served as CTO of Genome Compiler, acquired by Twist Bioscience, where he took on senior software leadership roles through its IPO. Avi Schroeder, PhD, scientific co-founder, a tenured Chemical Engineering professor at the Technion who has received over 30 prestigious awards, and Kira Radinsky, PhD, scientific co-founder, who previously founded SalesPredict, acquired by eBay, and served as eBay's Chief Scientist in Israel.
"The field of LNP discovery has historically been driven by stochastic experimental discovery, and has lacked systematic, methodical optimization across the full space of potential chemistries and formulations," said Yogev Debbi, co-founder and CEO of Mana.bio. "We believe that artificial intelligence methods provide a unique way to learn from the world's previously generated LNP data, novel data that we generate every day in our own lab, and even the design principles of adjacent non-LNP delivery systems. Mana.bio's integrated experimental and machine learning platform enables the discovery of smarter, faster, more precise delivery formulations to unlock the field of nucleic acid-based and genetic medicines. We are encouraged by our platform's early in vivo success and for its potential to deliver breakthrough therapies for a broad range of diseases."
