Why We Invested in CelerisTx
When we first met the two founders of CelerisTx back in May 2021, leveraging AI models for protein degradation was a promising but still very much an proven technological approach.
Feb 17, 2022
Gabriel Méhaignerie
When we at Pace Ventures first met the two founders of CelerisTx, Christopher Trummer and Jakob Hohenberger back in May 2021, leveraging AI models for protein degradation was a promising but still very much an unproven technological approach.
For those new to protein degradation, it is the controlled break up and destruction of proteins by intra- and extracellular systems that have gone haywire. There are several reasons for this, but the more important question is how can we get rid of these pathogenic (“bad”) proteins that can lead to many diseases that are yet undrugged.
The conventional approach has been to develop novel inhibitor drugs that block the function of the pathogenic protein. However, the challenge with the traditional method is twofold:
Novel drugs can cost around US$2.6bn, and it takes ~10 years to bring them to market, and
Only 10 to 20% of all proteins are easy to block with existing drugs. Yes, 10 to 20%!
What does that mean? In short, many chronic diseases known today, like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, do not have drugs that can effectively treat these debilitating diseases.
However, there have been several alternatives to inhibitor drugs in the last few years. A well-known and well-developed option is a PROTAC®, or a proteolysis-targeting chimera (tagging proteins for degradation). The PROTAC® concept was born out of the academic labs in the early 2000s when Craig Crews from Yale and Ray Deshaies believed that another way to shut down a pathogenic protein would be to target it for degradation.
How does targeted protein degradation work? The central mechanism exploited by CelerisTx that destroys pathogenic proteins is called the ubiquitin-proteasome system. A large fleet of enzymes patrols cells and marks the “bad” proteins to be destroyed with a chemical compound, called ubiquitin chains, and that’s a signal for the proteasome to chop up these proteins and destroy them. And some enzymes put these ubiquitin chains onto proteins destined for degradation.
So, what Crews and Deshaies realized is that you could build a molecule that artificially bridges the gap between a target protein and this ubiquitin machinery. And with that molecule, called a PROTAC®, you could get a protein ubiquitinated intentionally and therefore degraded. Therefore, PROTACs® — or the targeted degradation approach — expands the druggable proteome because now more proteins can be drugged by hijacking the proteasome.
This detail probably doesn’t yet sound exciting to you, but consider this. CelerisTx uses the latest machine learning / artificial intelligence to discover and design these PROTACs®, molecular glues, and small molecules that induce proximity between a pathogenic protein and protein disposal systems such as the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Their platform is 200K times faster than conventional methods while remaining accurate enough to discover these molecules.
Therefore, using their patent-filed platform technology, pharma and biotech R&D teams can cut development time, reduce testing iterations, and find proximity-inducing compounds or PICs to be used in novel drugs much faster. The PICs’ fast and rational design will lead to a higher success rate targeting the 80% pathogenic proteins that lead to diseases. Saying it another way, their tech help save lives.
Founders: Jakob Hohenberger (left) and Christopher Trummer (right)
CelerisTx Co-Founders Christopher and Jakob are also great examples of a European business quickly achieving global recognition with an internationally diversified investor base. Their investors are veritable who’s who of European biotech and healthcare deeptech with funds such as i&i Bio from Luxembourg and Apex Ventures out of Austria. R42 and Longevitytech.fund from the USA round out the list of investors on the cap table.
Another note is their early decision to keep building in Graz, Austria. Many of their Austrian peer startups tended to relocate after deciding there was not enough VC money to continue scaling there. However, Christopher and the team figured that the uniquely technical solid talent pool from the seven universities in Graz made the tradeoff worthwhile. They were right. Today CelerisTx has 18 people, with a large majority still based in Graz. They’ve become a local employer of choice and an exemplar of the strong hub for innovation built around Graz University and the University of Technology Graz (the top tier universities where 7 of their team members did their studies).
At a more macro level, and few people know, a number of the world’s leading protein degradation specialists, such as Georg Winter at the CeMM, originate and operate from Austria. And research centers of large pharmaceutical companies, such as Boehringer Ingelheim, concentrate their research near the location.
The closing of the recent $4.4mm seed round feels like the perfect launchpad to support a visionary and dedicated team to apply technology to make up for the shortcomings of occupancy-driven pharmacology (inhibitor drugs) currently on the market. We have been impressed by how the team attracted thought leaders in drug development and stay focused on being the best and fastest compared to peers. If the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is when humans are faced with a significant challenge, we tend to rise to the occasion.
We feel that CelerisTx’s technology provides a baseline for the next generation of startups using AI for drug discovery in the targeted protein degradation space. It is very encouraging to see several partners, such as Merck, already signed up for research collaborations with several more partnerships in negotiations.
We are blessed to have co-led the $4.4mm seed round and continue working directly with the founders as they build out their platform, pipeline, and partnership base leading up to their Series A. This is one of those teams with such high energy and drive to succeed that it almost makes us feel uneasy.
We look forward to an exciting partnership.
When we at Pace Ventures first met the two founders of CelerisTx, Christopher Trummer and Jakob Hohenberger back in May 2021, leveraging AI models for protein degradation was a promising but still very much an unproven technological approach.
For those new to protein degradation, it is the controlled break up and destruction of proteins by intra- and extracellular systems that have gone haywire. There are several reasons for this, but the more important question is how can we get rid of these pathogenic (“bad”) proteins that can lead to many diseases that are yet undrugged.
The conventional approach has been to develop novel inhibitor drugs that block the function of the pathogenic protein. However, the challenge with the traditional method is twofold:
Novel drugs can cost around US$2.6bn, and it takes ~10 years to bring them to market, and
Only 10 to 20% of all proteins are easy to block with existing drugs. Yes, 10 to 20%!
What does that mean? In short, many chronic diseases known today, like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, do not have drugs that can effectively treat these debilitating diseases.
However, there have been several alternatives to inhibitor drugs in the last few years. A well-known and well-developed option is a PROTAC®, or a proteolysis-targeting chimera (tagging proteins for degradation). The PROTAC® concept was born out of the academic labs in the early 2000s when Craig Crews from Yale and Ray Deshaies believed that another way to shut down a pathogenic protein would be to target it for degradation.
How does targeted protein degradation work? The central mechanism exploited by CelerisTx that destroys pathogenic proteins is called the ubiquitin-proteasome system. A large fleet of enzymes patrols cells and marks the “bad” proteins to be destroyed with a chemical compound, called ubiquitin chains, and that’s a signal for the proteasome to chop up these proteins and destroy them. And some enzymes put these ubiquitin chains onto proteins destined for degradation.
So, what Crews and Deshaies realized is that you could build a molecule that artificially bridges the gap between a target protein and this ubiquitin machinery. And with that molecule, called a PROTAC®, you could get a protein ubiquitinated intentionally and therefore degraded. Therefore, PROTACs® — or the targeted degradation approach — expands the druggable proteome because now more proteins can be drugged by hijacking the proteasome.
This detail probably doesn’t yet sound exciting to you, but consider this. CelerisTx uses the latest machine learning / artificial intelligence to discover and design these PROTACs®, molecular glues, and small molecules that induce proximity between a pathogenic protein and protein disposal systems such as the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Their platform is 200K times faster than conventional methods while remaining accurate enough to discover these molecules.
Therefore, using their patent-filed platform technology, pharma and biotech R&D teams can cut development time, reduce testing iterations, and find proximity-inducing compounds or PICs to be used in novel drugs much faster. The PICs’ fast and rational design will lead to a higher success rate targeting the 80% pathogenic proteins that lead to diseases. Saying it another way, their tech help save lives.
Founders: Jakob Hohenberger (left) and Christopher Trummer (right)
CelerisTx Co-Founders Christopher and Jakob are also great examples of a European business quickly achieving global recognition with an internationally diversified investor base. Their investors are veritable who’s who of European biotech and healthcare deeptech with funds such as i&i Bio from Luxembourg and Apex Ventures out of Austria. R42 and Longevitytech.fund from the USA round out the list of investors on the cap table.
Another note is their early decision to keep building in Graz, Austria. Many of their Austrian peer startups tended to relocate after deciding there was not enough VC money to continue scaling there. However, Christopher and the team figured that the uniquely technical solid talent pool from the seven universities in Graz made the tradeoff worthwhile. They were right. Today CelerisTx has 18 people, with a large majority still based in Graz. They’ve become a local employer of choice and an exemplar of the strong hub for innovation built around Graz University and the University of Technology Graz (the top tier universities where 7 of their team members did their studies).
At a more macro level, and few people know, a number of the world’s leading protein degradation specialists, such as Georg Winter at the CeMM, originate and operate from Austria. And research centers of large pharmaceutical companies, such as Boehringer Ingelheim, concentrate their research near the location.
The closing of the recent $4.4mm seed round feels like the perfect launchpad to support a visionary and dedicated team to apply technology to make up for the shortcomings of occupancy-driven pharmacology (inhibitor drugs) currently on the market. We have been impressed by how the team attracted thought leaders in drug development and stay focused on being the best and fastest compared to peers. If the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is when humans are faced with a significant challenge, we tend to rise to the occasion.
We feel that CelerisTx’s technology provides a baseline for the next generation of startups using AI for drug discovery in the targeted protein degradation space. It is very encouraging to see several partners, such as Merck, already signed up for research collaborations with several more partnerships in negotiations.
We are blessed to have co-led the $4.4mm seed round and continue working directly with the founders as they build out their platform, pipeline, and partnership base leading up to their Series A. This is one of those teams with such high energy and drive to succeed that it almost makes us feel uneasy.
We look forward to an exciting partnership.
When we at Pace Ventures first met the two founders of CelerisTx, Christopher Trummer and Jakob Hohenberger back in May 2021, leveraging AI models for protein degradation was a promising but still very much an unproven technological approach.
For those new to protein degradation, it is the controlled break up and destruction of proteins by intra- and extracellular systems that have gone haywire. There are several reasons for this, but the more important question is how can we get rid of these pathogenic (“bad”) proteins that can lead to many diseases that are yet undrugged.
The conventional approach has been to develop novel inhibitor drugs that block the function of the pathogenic protein. However, the challenge with the traditional method is twofold:
Novel drugs can cost around US$2.6bn, and it takes ~10 years to bring them to market, and
Only 10 to 20% of all proteins are easy to block with existing drugs. Yes, 10 to 20%!
What does that mean? In short, many chronic diseases known today, like Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, do not have drugs that can effectively treat these debilitating diseases.
However, there have been several alternatives to inhibitor drugs in the last few years. A well-known and well-developed option is a PROTAC®, or a proteolysis-targeting chimera (tagging proteins for degradation). The PROTAC® concept was born out of the academic labs in the early 2000s when Craig Crews from Yale and Ray Deshaies believed that another way to shut down a pathogenic protein would be to target it for degradation.
How does targeted protein degradation work? The central mechanism exploited by CelerisTx that destroys pathogenic proteins is called the ubiquitin-proteasome system. A large fleet of enzymes patrols cells and marks the “bad” proteins to be destroyed with a chemical compound, called ubiquitin chains, and that’s a signal for the proteasome to chop up these proteins and destroy them. And some enzymes put these ubiquitin chains onto proteins destined for degradation.
So, what Crews and Deshaies realized is that you could build a molecule that artificially bridges the gap between a target protein and this ubiquitin machinery. And with that molecule, called a PROTAC®, you could get a protein ubiquitinated intentionally and therefore degraded. Therefore, PROTACs® — or the targeted degradation approach — expands the druggable proteome because now more proteins can be drugged by hijacking the proteasome.
This detail probably doesn’t yet sound exciting to you, but consider this. CelerisTx uses the latest machine learning / artificial intelligence to discover and design these PROTACs®, molecular glues, and small molecules that induce proximity between a pathogenic protein and protein disposal systems such as the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Their platform is 200K times faster than conventional methods while remaining accurate enough to discover these molecules.
Therefore, using their patent-filed platform technology, pharma and biotech R&D teams can cut development time, reduce testing iterations, and find proximity-inducing compounds or PICs to be used in novel drugs much faster. The PICs’ fast and rational design will lead to a higher success rate targeting the 80% pathogenic proteins that lead to diseases. Saying it another way, their tech help save lives.
Founders: Jakob Hohenberger (left) and Christopher Trummer (right)
CelerisTx Co-Founders Christopher and Jakob are also great examples of a European business quickly achieving global recognition with an internationally diversified investor base. Their investors are veritable who’s who of European biotech and healthcare deeptech with funds such as i&i Bio from Luxembourg and Apex Ventures out of Austria. R42 and Longevitytech.fund from the USA round out the list of investors on the cap table.
Another note is their early decision to keep building in Graz, Austria. Many of their Austrian peer startups tended to relocate after deciding there was not enough VC money to continue scaling there. However, Christopher and the team figured that the uniquely technical solid talent pool from the seven universities in Graz made the tradeoff worthwhile. They were right. Today CelerisTx has 18 people, with a large majority still based in Graz. They’ve become a local employer of choice and an exemplar of the strong hub for innovation built around Graz University and the University of Technology Graz (the top tier universities where 7 of their team members did their studies).
At a more macro level, and few people know, a number of the world’s leading protein degradation specialists, such as Georg Winter at the CeMM, originate and operate from Austria. And research centers of large pharmaceutical companies, such as Boehringer Ingelheim, concentrate their research near the location.
The closing of the recent $4.4mm seed round feels like the perfect launchpad to support a visionary and dedicated team to apply technology to make up for the shortcomings of occupancy-driven pharmacology (inhibitor drugs) currently on the market. We have been impressed by how the team attracted thought leaders in drug development and stay focused on being the best and fastest compared to peers. If the Covid-19 pandemic has taught us anything, it is when humans are faced with a significant challenge, we tend to rise to the occasion.
We feel that CelerisTx’s technology provides a baseline for the next generation of startups using AI for drug discovery in the targeted protein degradation space. It is very encouraging to see several partners, such as Merck, already signed up for research collaborations with several more partnerships in negotiations.
We are blessed to have co-led the $4.4mm seed round and continue working directly with the founders as they build out their platform, pipeline, and partnership base leading up to their Series A. This is one of those teams with such high energy and drive to succeed that it almost makes us feel uneasy.
We look forward to an exciting partnership.