Exclusive: Protuoso gets $9.5M to build the next hub-and-spoke antibody developer
- Protuoso Bio
- May 26
- 2 min read
Biotech Correspondent, Endpoints News
Variations on the hub-and-spoke model have blossomed in the drug development industry over the past few years — and a new antibody hub is entering the fray.
Protuoso Biosciences collected a $9.5 million seed round from Taya Venture, Darwin Ventures and NSG Ventures, among others, the company exclusively told Endpoints News the day before its public launch.
Protuoso is beginning with three wings: cardiometabolic diseases, where it can “address both the upstream obesity biology” and the “downstream end-organ disease or damage”; as well as cancer and autoimmune conditions. It aims to treat the “root cause” of diseases with its antibodies, said co-founder and chair Tim Lu, who’s helped co-found other biotechs such as Tango Therapeutics and Senti Bio.
The California startup is emerging with a platform that creates multifunctional antibodies that it dubs “muxbodies.” The name is inspired by multiplexers in the world of electronics, which have multiple inputs and a single output.
“We designed them to combine diverse protein modalities into that single molecule, so we can leverage antibodies, cytokines, peptides [that are] put all into a single scaffold,” president and co-founder Willie Xiang told Endpoints in an interview.
Protuoso’s name is a play on “protein virtuosos,” and Xiang said it aims to “go beyond that incremental improvement” seen with current biologics. The biotech is building its antibodies from the “ground up,” which is in contrast to some of the newer biotech startups in the US that have formed around in-licensed assets from companies in other countries.
Roivant, BridgeBio, Paragon Therapeutics and CinRx also use the hub-and-spoke approach, in which Protuoso is able to go into multiple therapeutic areas that can be attractive to outside investors or pharmaceutical acquirers.
There’s been a proliferation of activity in the bispecific arena, Lu said, but Protuoso wants to move beyond “blocking two things at once” and “take that to the next level” with engineering that can “really tune all aspects of the molecule.”
“We’re seeing examples of these [bispecifics] coming out and having pretty amazing efficacy, but they’re still pretty simple in terms of what they can do,” Lu said in a joint interview with Xiang.
Xiang and Lu said Protuoso’s hub-and-spoke model can take many paths. It could look like that of BridgeBio, where the hub goes through an IPO and then it spins out certain pieces, such as BridgeBio Oncology Therapeutics.
The model also gives Protuoso the flexibility of finding VC investors for individual spokes or taking those branches public, as Paragon’s eight offshoots have done so far. Or it could sell asset-focused spokes to pharma, as CinRx did when AstraZeneca bought CinCor Pharma for $1.3 billion upfront in 2023. That deal led to an FDA approval this month.
