Costa Mesa-based early stage venture capital investor CerraCap Ventures said one of its portfolio companies, Totient, has been acquired by Absci Corp., a Vancouver, Wash.-based synthetic biology company that went public last month (Nasdaq: ABSI) and is now valued around $2 billion.
Absci is paying $40 million upfront for Cambridge, Mass.-based Totient, with another $15 million in potential milestone payments, according to regulatory filings. CerraCap’s stake in Totient at the time of the sale was not disclosed.
Totient is an artificial intelligence-driven drug discovery platform that identifies and harnesses human immune responses to identify novel antibodies and their therapeutic targets. To date, Totient has reconstructed more than 4,500 antibodies from over 50,000 patients, and has “de-orphaned” a collection of promising antibodies by identifying and validating their target antigens, according to Absci.
Absci is focused on studying the potential of proteins as next-generation therapeutics. This acquisition adds antibody and target discovery technology to Absci’s platform for therapeutic protein design and biomanufacturing optimization.
RESEARCH
Irvine-based AIVITA Biomedical, a private biotechnology company specializing in a variety of stem cell applications, has worked with researchers from University of California, Irvine to design and demonstrate a bioreactor for nearly labor-free retinal organoid maintenance. The success of the bioreactor serves as an important proof of concept for future clinical and commercial applications, according to the company. It also builds upon AIVITA Biomedical’s prior success in generating 3D retinal organoids from human stem cells and demonstrating their ability to restore visual acuity to rodent models of human blindness.
“To have validated an automated device that can reliably produce retinal organoids expands their potential therapeutic and diagnostic applications,” said Gabriel Nistor, M.D., Chief Scientific Officer at AIVITA.
The work is supported by funding from the California Institute for Regenerative Medicine and National Institutes of Health.
Last December, AIVITA completed a $25 million round of financing to fund cancer vaccines.
In addition to medical uses, Aivita also had offered a line of cosmetics products marketed under the “Root of Skin” brand, which had reportedly sold well in Japan.
That line of business has been discontinued, according to the company’s website.
