Months after launching publicly with $26 million in venture funding, biotech startup 1910 Genetics has inked its first government contract. The startup will explore non-opioid pain relief with the help of a $550,000 grant through the National Institutes of Health's Small Business Technology Transfer program.
The pain management program is Cambridge-based 1910 Genetics' first disclosed target. The grant requires the company to come up with a lead drug candidate by next December, with the option to extend by one year if needed. After that, CEO and founder Jen Nwankwo said the company will be ready to begin preclinical work to prepare the drug for Phase 1 trials, with plans to test therapeutics for four different types of pain.
1910 Genetics' promise lies in its use of artificial intelligence to inform its drug discovery and development process. Nwankwo believes that taking a computational biology approach will help inform scientists as to which targets are more or less likely to react to specific drugs, helping speed up the entire drugmaking process. Nwankwo and her team want to make drug discovery a repeatable process, one trained on data, rather than the trial-and-error that characterizes lab work today.
"I understand a pain point really well, which is that early preclinical drug discovery phase where you've identified a target, you have a strong conviction that the target is linked to disease, and the problem is accessing it," Nwankwo said. "You know these targets to be the holy grail, and you just can't reach them."
Founded in 2018, the startup was part of famed accelerator Y Combinator's winter 2019 cohort, where it raised a $4.1 million seed round led by the program's president, Sam Altman.
Nwankwo said the startup was toiling through the early stages — first in the Cambridge Innovation Center, then at LabCentral — until mid-2020, when it caught the attention of Microsoft. 1910 Genetics had deployed its software in the study of Covid-19 and, in less than 60 days, identified two therapeutics that could block the entry of SARS-CoV-2 into human cells, Nwankwo said. She went on to speak about her team’s discoveries at the 2020 NIH Antiviral Summit convened by Dr. Anthony Fauci.
The company didn't set out to raise venture capital then, but Microsoft was a major inbound lead, and other investors followed. M12, Microsoft’s venture fund, would go on to co-lead a $22 million Series A round with Playground Global. 1910 Genetics announced the round with its public launch in March.
Since then, Nwankwo has been busy solidifying the relationship with Microsoft, hiring a full team and overseeing the buildout of a brand new, 10,000-square-foot facility in the Seaport District. In Boston, Nwankwo has about a 20-person team, including biotech veterans like vice president of computational chemistry Lewis Whitehead, who previously spent 20 years at Novartis and headed up the computational chemistry division at Nimbus Therapeutics. She has another seven or so offers going out by the end of the month, and she hopes to grow to just over 40 employees by the end of the year in Boston and India, where the company's synthetic biologists are based.
The NIH grant allows Nwankwo to build on work she began as a PhD student at Tufts University, where she first began working on the target Calpain-1. She believes it could unlock pain relief in sites that have been historically difficult for drugs to reach.
Nwanko said that as a student, she benefited from Boston's collaborative academic ecosystem, but when she became a young founder — she started 1910 Genetics at 28 years old — that was not the case.
"The VC ecosystem here is not trying to invest in a founder like Jen. They're trying to invest in five old white men who were Pfizer executives for the last 25 years," Nwankwo said.
In fact, she believes that 1910 Genetics would not have gotten started had she not gone to the West Coast to raise capital; the company's entire investor base comes from California and New York.
"We raised this money externally and came in to spend it internally," Nwankwo said. "In some ways, Boston takes credit, and I don't think they should be taking credit."
That said, Nwankwo believes the tides are shifting. Next month, she will be participating in the Founder-Led Biotech Summit, a multiday virtual event hosted by Petri, Pillar VC's biotech arm. And she still benefits from the research institutions here: Some of her key hires have come from places like MIT and Mass General Brigham.
"I think I have benefited from the rich ecosystem here," Nwankwo said. "But how could I have started this company with Boston financing? That's the food for thought I would leave with readers."
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