LabGenius: Discovery and design of orally available next generation therapeutic candidates using a proprietary machine learning-driven evolution engine (EVA)

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**The Company**LabGenius is a drug discovery company that develops protein therapeutics using its novel drug discovery platform, EVA. This next-generation protein engineering platform integrates several cutting-edge technologies from the fields of synthetic biology, robotics and Machine Learning. EVA can design, conduct and learn from experiments to discover novel therapeutic assets that the lifescience industry is currently unable to achieve and to progress to pre-clinical and clinical trials.The biologics drug discovery market is valued at approximately £9.2 billion, of which the phase of lead optimization was valued at about £4.6 billion (Statistica, 2019).**Project Motivation**LabGenius aims to use the novel EVA platform to deliver a first-in-class oral delivered drug for the treatment of Inflammatory Bowel Disease (IBD), a gastrointestinal condition comprising Crohn's disease (CD) and ulcerative colitis (UC). IBD is a chronic disease that affects 0.5-1% of the population with an estimated 620,000 affected in the UK. The average annual care cost is over £4,600 per patient in the UK.Gold standard treatment is with biologic therapeutics. However, biologic drugs can only be administered systemically as the harsh conditions of the stomach and small bowel result in rapid degradation.This project would result in protein antibodies resistant to the pH, proteases and temperature of the GI tract. If successful, it would allow biologics to be delivered orally and would not only be a paradigm shift for the treatment of IBD but also open an entirely new method of administration of antibodies which are currently only administrable parenterally. The chosen drug target is a valid one as there is already a successful injectable drug on the market that is directed to it.This project is anticipated to deliver transformative effects for LabGenius opening new markets, generating revenues and team growth, and driving R&D investment - benefiting the UK economy.