Protein design startup Outpace lands $144M to test treatments that target solid tumors
Summary
Outpace Bio, a Seattle startup using artificial intelligence to design proteins that are incorporated into cancer therapies targeting solid tumors, has raised $144 million in new cash from investors.The fresh funding will allow Outpace researchers to test its treatment in a clinical setting. The goal is to benefit patients and validate the companys approach to battling cancer.A growing number of cancer treatments harness a type of immune system cell called a T cell to target and destroy cancerous cells. The strategy has been successful for blood cancers, but the solid tumors are better at deflecting the therapies, said Outpace co-founder and CEO Marc Lajoie.So Outpace is modifying the T cells in multiple ways to improve their performance while limiting harmful side effects for patients.If you think of cancer as a game of Whack-a-Mole, you cant just whack the first mole and win the game, Lajoie told GeekWire. And so you need multiple technologies in place to be resilient to all of those different mechanisms that the cancer can throw at you to turn off the activity of the drug.Outpace co-founders Lajoie and Scott Boyken, who serves as the startups chief technology officer, met as University of Washington postdoctoral fellows in the Institute for Protein Design (IPD), which has been pumping out multiple biotech startups in Seattle.After leaving IPD, the two joined up with a team that included Dr. Stan Riddell, a renowned immunotherapy researcher from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center, to launch Lyell Immunopharma in 2019. Lajoie and Boyken spun off Outpace in 2021 to develop additional protein design-based drugs.Outpace is pursuing a chimeric antigen receptor (CAR) T cell therapy for patients with advanced platinum-resistant epithelial ovarian, fallopian tube or primary peritoneal cancers.