Drugs that correct an imbalance in the immune system are known as immunotherapies and have profound therapeutic activity. Much of the successful development of these drugs can be attributed to a limited number of companies that took a risk on what was initially a new approach. The development of Checkpoint Blockade therapies most notably exemplified this. Through target validation and drug development, patients benefited, and new paradigms were established.
We believe that life-changing discoveries originate from academic labs. Unfortunately, most of these first-in-class discoveries face a gauntlet of licensing and early-development hurdles that inhibit their development. The current pathway from academia to the clinic is lined with risks and costs that prohibit the final stages of translating these discoveries into medicines.
We intend to reimagine drug discovery; by placing our studio lab adjacent to academic labs, we promote and facilitate collaboration. We will rapidly validate the efficacy, safety, and developability of academic discoveries by repeatedly recruiting new ideas into the studio with efficiency and low friction. By inviting academics into our partnership, together we will convert these discoveries into a broad portfolio of first-in-class immunotherapy drug candidates to meet unmet medical needs in cancer, inflammation, infection, and autoimmunity. We are focused on developing a pipeline of biologics, including monoclonal antibodies (mAbs) and mAb derivatives. We are continuously propelled by our novel R&D platforms and proprietary assays, as well as by the ongoing innovations in our studio.
Novel immunotherapeutics face a formidable therapeutic valley of death. Successfully navigating this valley can provide significant value to patients and investors – typically the largest step-up in a program’s lifetime. We provide the necessary R&D infrastructure to rapidly and effectively traverse this valley.
The successful use of artificial intelligence (AI) as a tool in drug development is contingent on the quality, depth, and number of training datasets. Further, the development of the next generation of immunotherapies requires us to resolve the details of precisely how the immune system is malfunctioning in individual patients.
One of our founders, Max Krummel, and colleagues have been working to study hundreds of immune systems across cancers and autoinflammatory disorders. This has resulted in deep immune phenotyping datasets that are used as training input for AI and modern machine learning methods to develop a sophisticated classification of disease that focuses on the immune features and circuits that are repeatedly but variably used in patients. Patients fall into classes, and new drug development is aimed precisely at the immune malfunctions within that class. Called "Immune Archetypes," this model forms the backbone for a key Foundery platform and provides us with unrivaled insight into the biology underlying immune-based diseases. Understanding biology as it manifests in specific patients helps our team to focus our drug development to ensure we target the right patient cohorts that are most likely to benefit from our therapies and even achieve cures.
An implicit strategy of Foundery is to create a highly sophisticated studio lab that retains the key knowledge and platforms necessary for the ongoing development of immunotherapies. Our value-creation model is based on pursuing trusted and consequential collaborations with academic institutions. This increases value and optimizes the number of ideas that we can test and develop. We use our platforms together with those of our partners to do integrated science. We continuously apply and refine our platforms with input from an ever-growing collection of scientific partners. The result is an early investment and discovery engine.
