Cyrus Biotechnology is a Seattle-based, pre-clinical-stage biotech combining computational and experimental protein design and screening to create novel biologics. Its core platform builds on Rosetta plus proprietary AI algorithms, bioinformatics and cheminformatics tools, cloud infrastructure, and rigorous benchmarking to design and optimize proteins. Cyrus focuses on redesigning natural proteins to improve efficacy (binding affinity, aggregation propensity, solubility, stability) and safety (binding specificity, immunogenicity) across multiple indications. The company has initiated a variety of in-house and partnered programs, including autoimmunity work with Selecta Biosciences, and collaborates with The Broad Institute on next-generation CRISPR engineering. The acquisition of Orthogonal Biologics adds deep mutational scanning protein engineering capabilities and brings a broad-spectrum protein-based COVID-19 therapeutic and another biologic into Cyrus’s pipeline. Cyrus has worked with over 90 industry partners and says its unified tools have helped advance partner molecules to pre-clinical development and IND. Cyrus Biotechnology develops Cyrus Bench®, a graphical, cloud-enabled Software-as-a-Service platform built on the Rosetta protein modeling toolkit and SparksX for protein structure prediction, design and engineering. Bench® is intended to broaden access to advanced computational protein engineering methods and to make them more user-friendly for a wider range of scientists. The company also offers custom software development and scientific support services in computational protein engineering. Cyrus launched a software beta in 2016 with an initial release in early 2017 and has rapidly acquired customers including Fortune 500 pharmaceutical firms (seven of the top 20 pharma firms), chemical and consumer-products companies, and privately held biotech and synthetic biology firms. Management says the platform accelerates drug discovery and new product development and aims to expand capabilities and opportunities for the Bench® platform. The company closed a Series A financing to fund that expansion.

Total raised

$26M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Series B

Latest activity

Dec 2021