Life Science Washington’s Member Spotlight series highlights the innovations, impact, and future vision of our member companies in the life sciences industry. Through curated questions, we explore their origins, breakthrough technologies, local presence, and industry leadership. This initiative showcases their contributions and strengthens connections within the life sciences community. If your organization is a member and would like to be highlighted in a future spotlight, please contact Kaitlyn Campitiello, Director of Marketing and Communications.
Tell us your origin story. How did Cyrus Biotechnology come to be, and what inspired its creation.
Cyrus was founded by three postdoctoral researchers in David Baker’s laboratory at the University of Washington, with the vision of making the ground-breaking Rosetta protein design software suite convenient and accessible to the biotech and pharma industries. Cyrus sold subscriptions to a popular GUI version of Rosetta called Cyrus Bench, which found its way into most major pharma companies alongside many academic labs. In 2021, the company recognized its capabilities in protein design had unrealized potential to address patient needs and unlock greater wealth creation by pivoting to internal therapeutics development, with a focus on naturally-occurring proteins that have been challenging to turn into drugs. The company now has a maturing pipeline with its first engineered therapeutic advancing into clinical studies.
How has AI and ML enabled you to accelerate the design and optimization of proteins, and what key advantages do these approaches offer over traditional methods?
A problem of particular interest to Cyrus is immunogenicity, where any unfamiliar protein is recognized as foreign and triggers an immune response. The immunogenicity problem has prevented the wide-spread therapeutic use of non-human proteins (such as bacterial proteins), and certain human proteins (such as those used as a replacement for proteins missing in hereditary genetic disease) and it will pose significant challenges to the clinical use of de novo designed proteins. As a consequence, only a small fraction of the available universe of protein sequences is suitable for drug development.
Cyrus uses existing AI/ML tools, as well as training our own with internal data, to identify and remove immunogenic sequences in proteins. The problem of immunogenicity has historically been perceived as almost insurmountable, yet advancements in AI and ML offer solutions that will be deeply impactful on protein drug development.
Can you share an example of how Cyrus’ protein engineering technology has been applied in a therapeutic setting, and what impact it had on development timelines or efficacy?
The company’s flagship program – CYR212 – is an engineered bacterial enzyme that degrades human immunoglobulin G antibodies, which are responsible for many autoimmune diseases, in which the body starts to produce these antibodies targeted against its own tissues. The wild-type enzyme has proven to have very limited therapeutic potential, suffering from a short half-life and, because it is a foreign bacterial protein, is highly immunogenic. This immunogenicity means that a potent immune response is triggered by a second administration of the enzyme, clearing it rapidly from the blood stream and making it unsuitable for anything but brief single applications. At Cyrus, this enzyme has been engineered using Big Data experimental and AI computational methods, creating a molecule with long half-life and extremely low immunogenicity.
CYR212 will enter clinical development in 2026 and has the potential to be highly disruptive among the class of immunoglobulin G lowering drugs. Owing to its catalytic mechanism, CYR212 provides fast and deep immunoglobulin G depletion at astonishingly small doses that permit convenient, subcutaneous administration.
How does Cyrus’ use of open source and strategic collaborations with pharma or biotech partners shape your business model and growth opportunities? Can you share any key learnings or successes from these partnerships?
In 2021, Cyrus partnered with Selecta Biosciences to develop an Interleukin-2 (IL-2) therapeutic. IL-2 has been extensively engineered and there are multiple IL-2 biologics in development. It was therefore assumed that in the face of such a crowded field, a novel and patentable IL-2 would be impossible for Cyrus to identify. However, through careful application of Big Data experimental and computational approaches, the company created a completely novel and more effective IL-2 than competing efforts. This experience opened up the entire interleukin field for drug development using similar approaches.
In addition, Cyrus is a founding member of OpenFold, a public consortium including major pharma companies, developing an open-source version of the leading protein modeling software AlphaFold and keeping Cyrus at the bleeding edge of AI and ML protein design tools.
How has Cyrus’ relationship with the Institute for Protein Design (IPD) influenced your approach to research and development, and what advantages has it provided in terms of innovation and collaboration?
When Cyrus was a Software as a service business, we were deeply connected with the IPD and were involved in the rapid commercialization of new computational tools developed by IPD researchers.
Cyrus has since pivoted to being a therapeutics company with its own independent technology and platform, but our roots to the IPD continue to inspire our approaches to drug development. In particular, immunogenicity problems foreseen at the IPD with computationally designed de novo proteins, which have never existed before in nature, have deeply impacted how we optimize non-human proteins as therapeutics. The original methods for immunogenicity reduction began in the IPD and have since evolved at Cyrus.
What did you learn from participating in Life Science Washington Institute’s WIN Mentoring Program that you couldn’t learn elsewhere, and how was this critical to your success?
We were part of the WIN program while the founders were postdocs or academics without previous experience founding companies. The mentor program was key for our first senior hire, the VP Sales coming from Biovia one of the top biotech software firms, coaching us in writing a JD, driving recruiting strategy, and choosing the final candidate. The program was also a sounding board for early product and go to market strategy. Strategy, hiring, recruiting, Sales/BD were all new to us, and were complementary to the NSF iCorps program, which focused much less than WIN on operational aspects of a startup.
Where do you see Cyrus Biotechnology in the next 5-10 years? Can you share some of your most exciting upcoming projects or innovations?
CYR212 is expected to be in Phase 2 clinical trials within 4 years and in Phase 3 trials by 7 years. for the treatment of serious hematological and neurological autoimmune diseases. Because of its long half-life, very potent activity and significantly reduced immunogenicity, CYR212 has the potential to be best-in-class for Immunoglobulin G-lowering drugs. These characteristics are expected to translate to a less frequent dosing, a convenient sub-cutaneous route of administration, very fast symptomatic relief for patients, high efficacy, and low cost of goods. We further expect a second program – an interleukin-22 therapeutic under development – to be in mid-clinical testing for irritable bowel disease.
The company’s platform, combining proprietary experimental and AI methods, has already generated one of the largest data sets in the world for the purpose of engineering immunogenic proteins, and there is an exciting future coming where any immunogenic foreign or de novo protein may be enabled as a human therapeutic.
Learn more about Cyrus Biotechnology and stay updated by following their social channels:
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If your organization is a member of Life Science Washington and would like to be highlighted in a future spotlight, please contact Kaitlyn Campitiello, Director of Marketing and Communications.