Company designs powerful drugs using antibodies sourced directly from humans

Infinimmune, a biotechnology company pioneering new methods for antibody drug discovery and development, today announced that it has closed a $12 million seed round led by Playground Global, with participation from Pear VC, Civilization Ventures, Axial VC, Ron Alfa, Jacob Becraft, Paul Conley, and Joshua Meier.

Infinimmune is reinventing antibody drug discovery by focusing solely on human-derived antibody drugs. Inside every human, the equivalent of 100 billion antibody clinical trials are conducted every day, testing each antibody for safety and efficacy in parallel. Infinimmune will harness this phenomenon to discover, characterize, and export protective antibodies in therapeutic form from humans to the clinic. These antibodies constitute fundamentally better drug candidates than those originating in other organisms.

“The industry has proven the value of antibody-based drugs, but the limited number of both drugs and targets demonstrates a need for new approaches to discovery,” said Wyatt McDonnell, CEO and Co-founder of Infinimmune. “We aim to take full advantage of truly human antibodies, identifying better and safer drug candidates more efficiently. We’re thrilled that this world-class group of investors shares our vision, and we are excited to expand our team of top talent, develop our R&D capabilities, and scale our operations.”

“Infinimmune presents a bold vision to deliver safer and more effective antibody-based drugs that address unmet needs,” said Ben Kim, Venture Principal at Playground Global. “Infinimmune’s founding team is a group of tool builders who design from first principles and have broad experience across immunology, single-cell methods development, protein engineering, computational biology, and genome assembly. Together, they have a proven track record of scaling technology to capitalize on significant market opportunities and we’re excited to partner with them at the beginning of this journey.”

Infinimmune founders Wyatt McDonnell, Katie Pfeiffer, Mike Gibbons, Lance Hepler, and David Jaffe have led development teams at 10x Genomics, Pacific Biosciences, and the Broad Institute. Together, they are uniquely positioned to take advantage of the explosion in single-cell technology, leverage powerful datasets and sample cohorts, and build and integrate new technology to identify new targets and develop new classes of safe and effective antibody drugs.

“Infinimmune combines a world-class team of technologists with a state-of-the-art platform for the discovery, characterization, and validation of truly human antibodies,” said Eddie Eltoukhy, Partner at Pear VC. “We are excited about this human-first approach to drug discovery, and we are thrilled to back the Infinimmune team as they leverage the resulting data and insights to develop exceptional drug candidates for patients in need.”

About Infinimmune

Infinimmune is a biotechnology company pioneering a novel approach to antibody drug discovery and development. Founded by a world-class, multidisciplinary team of scientists and technologists, Infinimmune is reinventing antibody discovery with an end-to-end platform to deliver antibody drugs derived directly from the human immune system. These truly human antibodies are designed to drug new and existing targets with improved safety and efficacy. Infinimmune will deploy its holistic approach to build its own pipeline of drug candidates and partner with pharmaceutical companies to advance their antibody programs, fill their pipelines, and reach new patients and new indications. To learn more, visit infinimmune.com and engage with us on LinkedIn and Twitter.

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