Disrupting Chronic Inflammation with AI-Driven Long-Acting Biologics

Chronic inflammatory and autoimmune diseases represent a pervasive and escalating global healthcare burden, affecting hundreds of millions worldwide. Conditions such as severe asthma, atopic dermatitis, and rheumatoid arthritis not only diminish patient quality of life but also exert immense pressure on healthcare systems through long-term management, frequent clinical visits, and high treatment costs. The continued proliferation of significant immunology and inflammation (I&I) deals in 2025 signals a vibrant market ripe for further innovation, yet existing blockbuster biologics, while effective, often demand frequent parenteral administration.

This creates substantial adherence challenges, patient dissatisfaction, and logistical hurdles. Our investment thesis centers on a transformative opportunity at the nexus of advanced biologic engineering and artificial intelligence: developing next-generation biologics with dramatically extended half-lives, fundamentally reshaping patient experience and market dynamics in these high-value therapeutic areas.

Our investment targets a proprietary platform capable of significantly extending the serum half-life of biologics, primarily through sophisticated engineering of the Fc region of antibodies. The technical core of this innovation lies in the precise manipulation of the neonatal Fc receptor (FcRn) recycling pathway. Under physiological conditions, the FcRn receptor binds to the Fc domain of IgG molecules in acidic endosomes, protecting them from lysosomal degradation and recycling them back to circulation at neutral pH.

This advanced FcRn engineering offers a profound advantage: drastically reduced dosing frequency (e.g., from bi-weekly or monthly to quarterly), which directly translates to superior patient adherence, reduced administrative burden for healthcare providers, and significantly improved convenience and quality of life for patients managing chronic conditions. The complexity of balancing extended half-life with optimal effector function, minimal immunogenicity, and excellent developability profiles creates a formidable technical moat, demanding sophisticated design and validation.

The accelerated discovery and precise engineering of these next-generation biologics are not merely incremental scientific advancements; they are profoundly enabled and de-risked by cutting-edge artificial intelligence and machine learning platforms. Our portfolio company integrates these capabilities across its R&D pipeline. For instance, Insilico Medicine's Pharma.AI platform offers unparalleled capabilities in de novo molecular design, rapidly generating novel protein scaffolds and optimizing sequences for desired binding characteristics and developability.

This predictive power allows for rational design iterations, selecting optimal Fc mutations that balance half-life extension with safety and efficacy, thereby reducing experimental cycles and accelerating development timelines. Concurrently, leveraging platforms akin to Recursion's BioHive-2 provides a vast biological search space, enabling phenotypic screening and the identification of novel therapeutic targets or pathways relevant to inflammation, as well as providing comprehensive phenotypic fingerprints of engineered molecules to ensure specificity and avoid off-target effects. This AI-driven approach transforms biologic engineering from an empirical, iterative process into a highly predictive and efficient design-build-test cycle, delivering superior drug candidates faster and at a lower cost.

This investment targets multi-billion dollar markets currently dominated by established biologics requiring frequent administration. Key competitors include Sanofi's Dupixent (dupilumab), a critical player in atopic dermatitis, asthma, and chronic rhinosinusitis with nasal polyps, typically administered bi-weekly,

and AstraZeneca's Fasenra (benralizumab), a treatment for severe eosinophilic asthma given monthly. Our differentiated long-acting biologic is poised for significant competitive displacement by offering a superior patient experience through drastically reduced dosing frequency. For patients grappling with chronic conditions, a shift from bi-weekly or monthly injections to quarterly or less frequent dosing represents a paradigm change in convenience, adherence, and overall quality of life.

This convenience factor alone is a powerful driver of patient and prescriber preference, leading to a rapid capture of market share. Furthermore, the AI-guided design process carries the potential for an optimized therapeutic profile, including potentially enhanced efficacy, reduced immunogenicity, or improved safety compared to first-generation biologics. While initial pricing may be at a premium due to the innovation, the substantial reduction in administration-related healthcare costs and improved patient adherence deliver compelling economic value to payers, further solidifying market adoption and establishing a durable competitive moat against existing and future therapies. The long-term vision includes expanding into neuroinflammatory indications, drawing from insights into conditions with Alzheimer's-like pathological changes, uncovering further unmet needs.