Avenue Biosciences secured $2.5M for its protein expression engineering platform

Avenue Biosciences, a company working on developing a platform to discover, develop, and optimize protein expression elements, has raised $2.5 million in seed funding to accelerate the development of its platform. The round was led by Voima Ventures, with participation from Inventure and US angel investors.

Leveraging machine learning to optimize signal peptides is a key element in the Avenue Biosciences platform. Signal peptides are crucial components in proteins that contain critical information, such as the protein's destination within a target cell. By optimizing these protein expression elements, Avenue Biosciences can unlock significant improvements in the efficiency and cost-effectiveness of producing complex proteins essential for treatments like monoclonal antibodies, gene therapies, and mRNA vaccines.

Avenue Biosciences' technology was co-invented by co-founders Ville Paavilainen and Juho Kelosalo, who are joined in the company's leadership team by CEO Tero-Pekka Alastalo and Katja Rosti. Avenue Biosciences aims to address one of biotech's major challenges: scalable and efficient protein production, which could potentially accelerate and widen access to innovative medical treatments. Avenue Biosciences operates from Helsinki and San Francisco and has been readying to launch commercial sales of its platform, which will start in Q4, 2024.