RubrYc Therapeutics wins Xcelerate Startup Pitch competition at Biotech Week Boston

Four minutes, four slides. That’s all the start-up entrepreneurs had to pitch their companies to a panel of judges at the Xcelerate Startup Pitch competition, hosted by EBD Group at this year's Biotech Week Boston. 

The pitch competition is designed to give early stage companies exposure to possible investors and partners, and is judged by top venture capitalists and industry experts. The panel awarded Isaac Bright, CEO at RubrYc Therapeutics, the top prize and afterwards we caught up with him.

Could you tell us a little bit about the company and how it got started?

RubrYc Therapeutics is a discovery stage biotherapeutics company focused on antibody drugs for oncology and autoimmune indications. The company started as a spin out from an immunomics company, a diagnostics-focused company called Healthtel. Where Healthtel had taken technology with a proprietary license out of Arizona State University and really driven that forward in diagnostic mode to evaluate what are called immunosignatures, we took some of the same technology, this peptide array platform, and started to use it with different library formats and content to interrogate protein-protein interactions. And that's what we use in our drug discovery efforts. We call that the interface discovery engine.

What sort of goals are you hoping to achieve?

Our vision for the business is to make medicines that have a profound impact for patients with cancer and autoimmune disease. We're still working through exactly what those key indications will be, as we prioritize. We just started five months ago today.

But the main aim for us is to really prove that our molecules are going to have the impact for patients in need. We'll obviously do work as per the industry standard in evaluating the performance of our molecules in important animal studies. We're working through in vitro assays now and we'll have animal data by this time next year as proof of concept. So next year, a big event for us will be raising our next round of private capital and driving forward for securing IMD for some of our drugs and getting through the first phase 1 studies.

As a start up, partnering is obviously very important. Have you got any partners lined up? Are you partnering with anyone at the moment? What's your approach to that?

We're actively partnering now in discussions. We've got several different proposals and term sheets that we're out in negotiations with now, but nothing that we can announce just yet. We're on our way. Our vision is to leverage the platform that we have, where we have unique insights into binding interfaces to help at the early stages of discovery, so it's kind of a code discovery and code development model that we're after.

As we get started here, we're really focused on developing custom immunogenes, where we use those to focus the immune response on particular epitopes, the most important epitopes. And then we use binding from post-immunization in different animal models to evaluate what that response is and whether or not we're likely to get antibodies from those animals that are going to be on-target and really discriminate against those that are going to be more promiscuous or binding off-target.

So, we take that as our key kernel, our early value proposition and discovery and we've built a team of drug discovery experts. We're only 11 so far, but we've got a lot of strong performers from past experiences that really are complementing what our platform does so, we expect between the platform and the strong team that we're building, that we should provide a lot of value for partners.

Finally, on a personal note, how do you find the startup process? Do you enjoy it?

I do. So, this is a unique opportunity because it is a spin out from another venture-backed company and that transaction was pretty complex, pretty highly structured. So, my background is more transactional than operational per se. I've spent time as an investment banker. I've spent time doing MNA work. I've spent as much time in other domains as I have in biotherapeutics. So, there's a lot that I lean on the team for and empower them to do and that's going to be important for how we build the business.

But going forward, what I'm excited about is that we've got a very clear plan. We've got a great nucleus now for the team, and it's really a function of adding the right people. I think the team is so, so important for how a startup is formed and if you have just one or two bad apples as you start a company, it really can be a fatal blow. So we're very focused on making sure that we have the right team, that that team develops a strong culture and that we're really focused on our mission and our vision for the company.

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