Tubulis has raised series A funding to progress an ADC development platform invented at Leibniz Research Institute and Ludwig Maximillians University.
Tubulis, a Germany-based antibody-drug conjugate spinout of Leibniz Research Institute in Berlin (FMP) and Ludwig Maximillians University Munich (LMU), has closed a €10.7m ($12.5m) series A round co-led by public-private partnership High-Tech Gründerfonds (HTGF).
BioMedPartners co-led the round and was joined by Bavarian state-owned Bayern Kapital, Seventure Partners and Occident, unnamed angel investors and members of Tubulis’s founding team.
Spun out in 2019, Tubulis has created a platform for designing antibody-drug conjugates (ADC) where the therapeutic agent is affixed to an antibody to enhance potency against antigens found only on the cells of its target pathogen.
Tubulis’s ADC design incorporates two technologies intended to make the conjugates more stable. First, a sulfur-harbour amino acid called cysteine is used to robustly conjugate the antibody and agent together.
The structure also emulates microtubules – nanoscale tubes aligning the cytoplasm within cells – in order to enhance the antibody’s ability to shield its payload.
Tubulis was founded on the back of a collaborative program co-led by Christian Hackenberger, the lead for FMP’s chemical biology research group.
Hackenberger cooperated with the team of Heinrich Leonhardt, professor of human biology and bioimaging at LMU’s Faculty of Biology, and Jonas Helma-Smets, a research lead in the same department who was selected as Tubulis’s chief scientific officer.
