Paris-based biotech company WhiteLab Genomics has raised €23.2 million ($26 million) in a Series B funding round. The company uses AI to help design the building blocks used in genomic medicines.
The funding round was led by AVP, an independent global investment firm managing more than €2.5 billion in assets. New investors Yaday Health and Blast Club also participated, along with existing investors Omnes Capital and Debiopharm Innovation Fund.
“AI can help us design better genomic medicines, but what ultimately matters is whether those designs work in living systems. We have already presented compelling results,” said Del Bourgo, co-founder and CEO of WhiteLab Genomics.
WhiteLab Genomics will use the new funding to expand its in vivo testing beyond AAVs and explore non-viral delivery technologies and programmable synthetic promoters. The company also plans to strengthen its Boston hub to build partnerships with North American biopharma companies and expand its presence on the US West Coast. It will also explore new opportunities in Japan and South Korea.
“WhiteLab is building AI that designs genomic medicines that actually work in vivo, not just on paper. AI is about to have a real, tangible impact on genomic medicine and to contribute meaningfully to the development of new therapies. The combination of computational design, experimental validation and the ability to translate those designs into differentiated bio-assets is what attracted us to the company. We are very excited to join the journey and support David and the team as they enter this next phase,” said François Robinet, managing partner of AVP.
WhiteLab Genomics was founded in 2019 by David Del Bourgo, Lucia Cinque, and Julien Cottineau. The Y Combinator-backed company combines AI and biology to develop better genomic medicines. Its goal is to solve a major challenge in genomic medicine: delivering treatments safely and effectively to the right cells in the body.
The company has developed its own AI platform called ALFRED (AI-Led Framework for Rational Exploration in Drug Design). The platform helps WhiteLab design and improve different delivery methods for genomic medicines, including viral and non-viral technologies.
Using ALFRED, WhiteLab works on delivery vehicles such as adeno-associated viruses (AAVs) and lipid nanoparticles. It also designs programmable genetic payloads and tests these technologies in laboratory and animal studies to see how well they work.
WhiteLab has already shown the potential of its technology through work with the Paris Brain Institute. Using ALFRED, the company developed new AAVs that were able to cross the blood-brain barrier in animal studies and target the brain while showing no detectable signal in the liver. This is an important result because delivering medicines to the brain is one of the biggest challenges in drug development.
