Developing effective medicines often requires scientists to find ways to influence proteins that drive diseases but resist conventional drug discovery techniques. Barcelona based biotechnology company ALLOX is seeking to tackle this challenge by combining experimental biology, large scale genetic analysis and artificial intelligence. The company has raised $10.5 million in seed funding to expand its technology platform, develop new small molecule therapeutics and advance its own drug discovery programmes.
Asabys Leads the Seed Funding Round
The $10.5 million funding round was led by Asabys through its Sabadell Asabys II fund, with participation from Spain’s Centre for Technological Development and Innovation, known as CDTI, through its SICC Innvierte programme, and the Institut Català de Finances. The investment represents approximately €9.4 million.
ALLOX plans to use the capital to strengthen its experimental platform, develop proprietary artificial intelligence models and move multiple research programmes closer to creating potential drug candidates. The company will also expand its internal drug discovery team and explore research collaborations with pharmaceutical and biotechnology businesses.
The funding comes alongside the appointment of Morten Graugaard as Independent Chair of ALLOX’s Board of Directors, bringing additional leadership experience as the company enters its next phase of development.
Tackling Difficult Drug Targets
Many existing medicines work by interacting with specific sites on proteins, the molecules responsible for carrying out essential biological functions. However, some proteins are difficult to target using traditional drug discovery methods.
Among the most challenging targets are protein protein interactions, through which proteins connect and influence one another, and transcription factors, which help regulate gene activity. These biological mechanisms play important roles in disease, but identifying suitable drug targets within them can be difficult.
ALLOX is developing a platform designed to identify previously overlooked regulatory regions within proteins. These regions may offer opportunities to develop small molecule medicines against targets that have historically proved challenging for researchers.
Combining Experimental Biology With AI
The company’s approach combines high throughput genetics, experimental biology, biophysics and computational analysis. Its platform measures the effects of thousands of genetic mutations in parallel, helping researchers understand how changes in protein structure influence folding, function and interactions.
This information can reveal different types of functional sites, including allosteric and orthosteric sites, as well as other regulatory regions that could serve as potential targets for therapeutic molecules.
An allosteric site is a region of a protein separate from its primary active site. A molecule that binds to this region can influence how the protein functions. Identifying such sites could open alternative routes for developing medicines where conventional approaches have struggled.
By combining experimental measurements with predictive AI models, ALLOX aims to turn large biophysical datasets into insights that guide the discovery of selective small molecule therapeutics.
Leadership Experience Strengthens the Company
Morten Graugaard brings more than two decades of experience in life sciences investment, research and development, business development and biotechnology company building.
He currently serves as Chief Business Officer at Orbis Medicines and previously held senior positions at Novo Holdings and Lundbeck. During his career, he has contributed to major pharmaceutical transactions and held board and advisory roles at biotechnology companies.
Júlia Domingo, CEO and co founder of ALLOX, said the investment would help the company expand its experimental platform and AI models while advancing its internal drug discovery pipeline. She emphasised the potential of combining large scale functional data with predictive AI to explore a broader range of challenging drug targets.
Graugaard said ALLOX’s approach could help address an important gap in drug discovery by generating functional insights that support the development of molecules, rather than simply identifying compounds that bind to proteins.
Building a Pipeline of Potential Medicines
With the fresh capital, ALLOX intends to advance multiple research programmes towards a focused pipeline of proprietary small molecule drug candidates. It will also develop AI models capable of predicting promising therapeutic regions from its experimental datasets and pursue partnerships with pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
Founded as a spin off from Barcelona’s Centre for Genomic Regulation, ALLOX is working to expand the range of proteins that researchers can target when developing new treatments.
The company’s technology remains part of an ongoing drug discovery effort, and further research will be required to establish whether its approach produces safe and effective medicines. The new funding provides resources to expand its platform and move its programmes forward, as ALLOX seeks to turn difficult biological questions into new therapeutic opportunities.
