SeaX Ventures has injected an additional 330 million baht in RyboDyn’s Seed round to accelerate innovation in cancer treatment using AI decoding."Dark Proteome"
On 25 Mar 2024 GMT+7, reporters reported that SeaX Ventures, a global deep tech startup fund, has continued its investment in RyboDyn, a U.S.-based biotech startup, with a Seed round worth approximately 330 million baht. This follows their previous Pre-seed investment and reflects confidence in RyboDyn's potential to discover new cancer drug approaches, accelerate AI platform development for finding new cancer treatment targets, and advance research toward human trials.
RyboDyn is developing a platform focused on the Dark proteome—proteins undetectable by traditional sequencing technologies. Although over 98% of the human genome was previously considered non-protein-coding, RyboDyn believes these regions hold undiscovered biological information that could lead to new protein targets involved in disease, which can be developed into cancer drugs.
Reporters added that RyboDyn’s platform integrates non-canonical RNA analysis with proteomics and AI to identify and validate cryptic proteins from real patient samples. All data is compiled into the company's proprietary rapidly expanding database. To date, RyboDyn has analyzed tumor samples from over 1,000 patients across 10 cancer types, discovering more than 3 million new RNA sequences and over 80,000 previously unknown proteins, including more than 15,000 directly related to cancer.
These advances allow RyboDyn to expand its search from highly competitive areas to new unexplored spaces, unlike the current industry that still relies on traditional targets like HER2 or PD-L1, which cover only subsets of patients. RyboDyn’s technology enables discovery of new targets for patients unresponsive to existing treatments, such as HER2-negative groups with high unmet needs, paving the way for broader targeted and immunotherapy development.
Technologically, the company has successfully produced prototypes tested in vitro, demonstrating that Antibody-Drug Conjugates (ADC) can destroy cancer cells via newly discovered proteins. This milestone is significant for cancer drug development and was a key factor supporting the current funding round.
Dr. Supachai Pacharayanan, founder and Managing Partner of SeaX Ventures, said that since the Pre-seed round, it has been clear that RyboDyn is not just a target discovery platform but is building an unprecedented cancer biology database. This continued investment reflects confidence in the company’s technology potential to develop new drugs and expand treatment options for patients with no current alternatives.