Peptides are a promising therapeutic modality in that they are small and specific in their targeting, while being relatively inexpensive to manufacture. Insulin is perhaps the best-known therapeutic peptide, but since 2000 33 non-insulin peptide therapeutics have been approved, spanning treatments for HIV, chronic pain, metabolic disease, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and more.
Improvements in production, purification, and analytics are critical to unlocking the full potential of the modality, as mistakes can quickly arise when stitching together the amino acids that comprise peptides. This is why our first move into the peptides ecosystem came in the form of our Series A investment in Mytide Therapeutics, whose machine learning-enabled platform produces natural and non-natural peptides 30-times faster than traditional manufacturing practices. Mytide’s continuously learning AI-guided engine enables higher purity, production reliability, and speed, by controlling a proprietary set of chemical processes, analytical tools, and robotics. This opens up a novel peptide space across difficult-to-manufacture non-canonical amino acids, constrained peptides, and short-proteins that are inaccessible or uneconomical to produce and screen using traditional peptide manufacturing processes.
Alloy’s ecosystem model recognizes that we can best enable therapeutic innovation by a model of disruptive collaboration—what we refer to as “outcollaborating the world, together.” We provide access to foundational, pre-competitive drug discovery technologies within Alloy, but recognize democratization can sometimes best be achieved by supporting the great work already happening in the industry. Our mandate of reinvesting 100% of our revenue into innovation and access to innovation enables to support next-generation manufacturing platforms like Mytide’s. We bring value by connecting the company with our ecosystem of pharmaceutical and biotech partners who can benefit from tight integration with a platform that speeds manufacturing and the transition from research to the clinic.
Additionally, we are building out in-house peptide therapeutics capabilities that will ultimately be offered through platform licenses and discovery services. We recognize the potential of peptides as components of multimodal therapeutics, due to their inherently small and sometimes unstable format—because they break down quickly in the body they often need to be paired with something else. By keeping our licensing terms generous and widely accessible, we believe our industry collaborators will be able to build innovative new therapeutic formats across the spectrum of modalities offered by Alloy, while still seeing an economic upside. Put another way, we aim to help our partners develop drugs from multiple innovative technologies without losing all of their potential profit on those drugs to licensing fees and royalties. This becomes especially powerful in the context of an Alloy Innovation Subscription, where our collaborators can access all Alloy technology for one flat annual fee, without milestones or royalties tied to Alloy-owned platforms.
We look forward to sharing our developments in this modality with you. Please reach out to our business development team to learn about in-licensing if you are developing a novel discovery technology in peptides. And learn more about how to work with Mytide Therapeutics for manufacturing partnerships here.
