Scientific breakthroughs have accelerated the pace at which new pharmaceuticals are being developed. Tierra Biosciences believes this pace can be even faster.
The San Leandro-based company has created a platform for AI-guided, custom protein synthesis, revolutionizing how pharmaceutical, industrial, and agricultural organizations develop new proteins. Instead of taking months, Tierra’s platform can produce new proteins in just weeks.
“Simply put, Tierra is enabling customers to order proteins online that can make anything from antibodies to growth factor for a food product.”
Their platform utilizes cell-free reagents to digitally sequence proteins, essentially creating a “blueprint” for protein production. Tierra takes this one step further by actually creating the DNA codes for the protein. These codes are then combined with the customer’s protein sequences and put into a robotic platform to create the desired proteins.
“When that protein goes through the process, we start generating lots of data,” Michael Nemzek, Tierra’s CEO, told TechCrunch. “We look at things like stability and solubility, and all these different parameters of the protein, and then we take that in front of a closed feedback loop.”
Traditionally, organizations develop new proteins using living cells, which Nemzek claims is slow, inefficient, and relies on poor data. With Tierra’s cell-free technology, the timeline is drastically reduced, and customers can receive real-time feedback on the viability of their proteins. For example, if a customer is making an enzyme for a laundry detergent, Tierra’s AI-powered large language model can quickly determine if the existing sequence will work or if it needs to be changed. This saves time and resources compared to the traditional live-cell development process.
“People making proteins today have to order DNA and then they have to transfect living cells. And there’s a lot to do to keep the cells alive,” Nemzek explained. “We provide an extremely high throughput way of generating proteins. If somebody needs 100 proteins to validate their AI model, we can do that in a few weeks. People can’t do that on their own without spending a lot of money.”
So far, Tierra has made over 5,000 proteins using its AI data model. But according to Nemzek, there’s an infinite number of proteins that could be made in the world.
“We profiled Tierra Biosciences in 2018 after it rebranded from Synvitrobio and raised $2.6 million in new financing,” he said. “Since then, the company went on to grab $7.2 million in grants from respectable government agencies, including the Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy, the National Institutes of Health, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency.”
Recently, Tierra brought on Nemzek as CEO in 2022 to lead the company to commercialization. He replaced co-founder Zachary Sun, who now serves as Chief Scientific Officer. Before joining Tierra, Nemzek was the Chief Commercial Officer at Synthego Corp., where he led the commercial expansion and growth of its CRISPR genome engineering business.
Now, with $11.4 million of new Series A funding, Nemzek is leading Tierra toward commercialization. The investment was led by Material Impact, a fund co-founded by Adam Sharkawy (a dealmaker at The Medicine’s company before Novartis acquired it in 2020) and Carmichael Roberts (known for his investment work at climate fund Breakthrough Energy Ventures). The round had participation from new and existing investors, including Prosus Ventures, In-Q-Tel (IQT), Hillspire, Freeflow Ventures, Creative Ventures, and Social Capital.
Tierra already has partnerships with major pharmaceutical, industrial, and agricultural organizations. With this new funding, they plan to expand to a broader set of customers and partners and build more of their AI data generation capabilities. They also intend to hire a commercial team to drive aggressive sales growth since launching the platform a year ago.
“Some customers have expressed interest in new industry-specific cell-free systems that don’t exist yet,” Nemzek shared. “We are also working on increasing the quantities of proteins we can produce. Currently, we can produce milligrams for customers to experiment with, and in the next month or two, we will scale up to a gram, which is more suitable for pilot programs.”
“Do we believe cell-free technologies will solve every protein problem? No, but it will solve about 80% of the curve,” Nemzek concluded. “If you’re trying to design a new protein to do whatever you’re interested in, you can go beyond nature and use Tierra’s predictive powers to develop the protein functions.”
