Avenue Biosciences received $5.7 million in seed extension to scale a high-throughput protein engineering technology designed to accelerate the discovery of protein-based tools and therapies. Balnord and Tesi co-led the funding round with support from Voima Ventures, Inventure, the University of Helsinki, and Dimerent.
The technology reportedly uses a library of thousands of naturally occurring and engineered signal peptides to measure the efficiency of protein biogenesis in the secretory pathway, the machinery responsible for folding, modifying, and secreting therapeutic proteins.
“The secretory pathway is one of the remaining black boxes in therapeutic protein production. Despite its importance, the current industry standard relies heavily on a decades-old playbook, testing only a small set of safe signal peptides rather than exploring thousands of sequence variants. Our technology makes the increasingly complex proteins, such as AI-designed proteins or multispecifics, more manufacturable, improving access to lifesaving therapies,” says Tero-Pekka Alastalo, CEO and co-founder of Avenue Biosciences.
Signal peptides are intrinsic components of proteins and represent a major untapped opportunity in biotechnology, as they critically affect protein production and quality at the cellular level, he explains.
“Novel protein-based biologics under development, for example, in cancer, rare diseases, or immunology, are becoming increasingly targeted and effective, performing several functions with one therapeutic component: bringing immune cells to the right place, activating them, and recognizing disease cells more specifically. However, this adds complexity to the protein structure, adding manufacturing cost, or in the worst case, preventing the development completely,” notes Katja Rosti, COO, co-founder, and Helsinki lab site lead.
Ultimately, the signal peptides are removed from the mature protein, keeping the target essentially the same as the original, making this approach highly useful also in manufacturing biosimilars, the lower-priced versions of existing therapies, continues Rosti, who points out that the Avenue technology collects data sets on how specific signal peptides impact specific protein targets.
