Metaphore Biotechnologies launches with molecular mimicry platform

Abstract

After 2 years of development at Flagship Pioneering, the start-up Metaphore Biotechnologies emerged on May 16 with $50 million of series A funding. It plans to tackle autoimmune and metabolic diseases, as well as cancer. Metaphore’s approach to drug discovery is to mimic and improve on pharmacophores—abstractions that describe the steric and electronic features needed for bioactive molecules to interact with a biological target and unlock a response in the body. “It all started actually with us asking the question: What if we could mimic any molecular interaction in a programmable way?” says Lovisa Afzelius, Metaphore’s CEO and cofounder. The company condenses the key interaction points of these pharmacophores and then builds a “mold.” This computational framework narrows down the potential molecular solutions from the vast chemical space available, making the optimization problem easier to solve. When building new compounds inside this mold, researchers use machine learning to optimize the