Why we invested in Passkey Therapeutics

I’ve had the pleasure of building a relationship with Bruce Beutel over the course of two years since he joined as an independent board member at another one of our portfolio companies. He has impressive depth and breadth of experience in the Biopharma space – from being an R&D leader at Abbott Labs to a business development lead at Merck and then into biotech formation at Dewpoint and beyond. That wide-ranging experience across the full lifecycle of drug development has left Bruce with a rare combination of wisdom and ambition, tempered by humility. His voice in the room has always prioritized solving the practical challenges of building a drug development company while never losing sight of the mission to help patients at scale.

His vision for Passkey is conceptually simple but profound in its implication. The traditional approach to drug development is to design a drug that selectively targets a single protein known to play a key role in a particular disease. However, the biology of human disease is often far more complex than these single-target drugs are able to successfully treat. That opportunity has led to increasing interest in developing drugs that modulate multiple proteins at once (e.g., multi-target small molecule drugs  or bi-specific antibodies).

‍While we expect that trend to continue, the current market opportunity is significantly constrained by the universe of known, well-characterized targets. Passkey’s goal is to dramatically expand that target space by computationally analyzing networks of human genes to discover previously unknown combinations of proteins that are therapeutically beneficial when modulated simultaneously. The company then develops drugs (called “SMThs”, or Synergistic Multifunctional Therapeutics) to target these combinations of proteins (called “multilogs”). We see broad potential in this approach to address a range of challenging disease biology across cancer, autoimmune, neurodegenerative and metabolic disorders. And while this multilog drug development platform is exciting in itself, what’s more compelling is the pace at which the company has begun developing its own pipeline in parallel.

Bruce was able to demonstrate exciting proof of concept data with remarkably limited time and capital, primarily due to his highly capable founding team including Will Chen and Soumya Ray. Building a platform biotechnology company is a challenge in any environment, but even more so when capital markets have become as asset-focused as they have in recent years. But we choose to let that pendulum swing back and forth as it always does, while we remain focused on partnering at inception with founders like Bruce who have a long-term vision for the future. We were delighted to back this team at the pre-seed alongside our friends at Innovation Endeavors and Bison. And now we’re thrilled to welcome Breakout Ventures as the lead investor in their Seed financing round.