The surfaces of cells are studded with proteins used to communicate with neighbors and visitors. A new method for mapping them and their interactions is revealing clues for making cancer and immune disease therapies.
On Thursday, a startup named InduPro, founded by three scientists from Merck — including two who invented the protein mapping technique — revealed its plans to refine the technology and design antibody drugs. InduPro, whose name is a portmanteau of “induced proximity,” has raised $85 million in Series A financing, the company told Endpoints News exclusively.
“It’s about identifying proteins in neighborhoods or bringing them into the same neighborhood,” said CEO Prakash Raman, who was recruited from the cancer drug biotech Ribon Therapeutics. Raman was previously chief business officer of Flagship Pioneering and head of business development at the Novartis Institutes for BioMedical Research.
The method works by labeling a known protein with an antibody that is loaded with a reactive molecule. When hit with a narrow beam of blue light, the molecule reacts with neighboring proteins, leaving behind fingerprints that allow scientists to isolate and identify those neighbors.
“It marks the proteins around it and we can use mass spectrometry to see what those proteins are,” Raman said. Known as MicroMapping, research on the technique was published by Merck and Princeton University researchers in Science in 2020, and the company was founded in 2022.
InduPro has expanded upon and industrialized the approach, and is using it to discover previously unknown pairings of proteins that sit next to each other on the surfaces of cancer cells, which it calls tumor-associated proximity antigens. The goal is to develop drugs against pairs of proteins only found on cancer cells (and not on normal cells) to minimize side effects.
Scott Lesley“It’s an opportunity to have more selective targeting,” said Scott Lesley, the president and chief scientific officer of InduPro and the former vice president of discovery biologics at Merck. “And if two things are close to each other, they are probably there for a reason.”
The startup’s lead program is a bispecific antibody-drug conjugate that binds a pair of cancer proteins. Raman said one of those targets is well-known and the other is one that “no one has anything in the clinic for.”
InduPro, which has labs in Seattle and Cambridge, MA, is planning to submit an application by the end of 2025 to begin clinical tests of its first drug but isn’t disclosing the targets or indications it’s initially focused on.
The company is also using its protein maps to find creative ways to bring two cells together, such as recruiting an immune cell to attack cancer or to dampen unwanted immune reactions in autoimmune diseases. Its second and third programs are bispecific antibodies based on this concept of induced proximity. Raman said that the company’s protein maps might also lead them to find overlooked proteins that can be targeted on their own.
Niyi Fadeyi and Rob Oslund, two scientists from the Merck Exploratory Science Center who co-invented the protein mapping technology, are now the vice presidents of chemical sciences and platform technology, respectively.
InduPro’s financing was co-led by The Column Group and Vida Ventures. Other investors include MRL Ventures Fund — Merck’s drug-focused investment fund — Emerson Collective and Euclidean Capital.