Insider Brief
- Unnatural Product’s $32 million in Series A funding led by Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (MGHIF) and TechBio-focused ARTIS Ventures.
- Other new investors include First Spark Ventures, The Venture Collective, Humain Ventures, LongeVC, and Not Boring Capital.
- Funds will be used to advance the development of UNP’s technology platform and expand the company’s focus beyond oncology into new opportunities.
PRESS RELEASE — Unnatural Products, Inc. (UNP), a biotech company pairing AI with chemistry to usher in the next generation of molecularly targeted therapeutics, has announced $32 million in Series A funding, led by Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (MGHIF) and TechBio-focused ARTIS Ventures. Other new investors include First Spark Ventures, The Venture Collective, Humain Ventures, LongeVC, and Not Boring Capital, alongside participation from existing investors. The funds will be used to advance the development of UNP’s technology platform and expand the company’s focus beyond oncology into new opportunities.
Prem Tumkosit, Managing Director of Merck Global Health Innovation Fund, has joined UNP’s board of directors.
Nature’s Solution to Hard Targets: Macrocycles
Macrocycles and cyclic peptides offer an opportunity to radically expand the druggable genome. Naturally derived macrocycles have been used as medicines across a variety of indications for decades. Their larger size and favorable drug-like properties allow macrocycles to hit intracellular targets too complex for small molecules and replicate the potency and selectivity of antibodies in an oral dosage form.
To address the panoply of targets that have been entirely off limits to previous approaches or have only yielded to injectable antibody and biologic strategies, UNP leverages a parallel chemistry and AI-driven platform that imbues targeted and designed synthetic macrocycles with the favorable drug-likeness of evolved macrocycles found in nature.
“We’re very fortunate to have the support from MGHIF and ARTIS and great new investors added to the roster in this round. This underlines our team’s hard work building a platform to accelerate this burgeoning molecular class,” said Cameron Pye, CEO and Co-Founder. “Macrocycles are today where antibody therapeutics were a couple of decades ago. We finally have the technologies to rapidly and reproducibly find and optimize macrocycles against any given target. I believe macrocycles will be as impactful to the pharmaceutical industry as the biologics revolution of the early 2000s.”
“We look to partner with ‘next horizon’ technologies with the potential to impact patient care,” said Prem Tumkosit, Managing Director of MGHIF. “We invest in the future of drug development by attempting to solve key technical challenges, opening up a world of possibilities that will only lead to better, more targeted solutions for patients suffering from a myriad of conditions.”
“Macrocycles can be the best of both worlds – combining the binding and delivery of peptides with the oral delivery of small molecules,” said Vasudev Bailey, PhD, Managing Partner at ARTIS Ventures. “We have always maintained that UNP’s unique approach combining machine learning with chemistry holds the key to hugely impact drug development for many conditions. We are confident their efforts hold the potential to make a difference in the lives of many.”
