Biologic Drug Discovery With AI: Sean McClain on The Long Run

Sean McClain is today’s guest on The Long Run.

He’s the founder and CEO of Vancouver, Washington-based Absci.

Sean McClain, CEO, Absci

Sean started the company on his own in his early 20s, straight out of the University of Arizona, with the encouragement of his Dad. You could call it a scrappy garage biotech, with no traditional VC backers at first. He found a way to do something useful, developing an E.coli assay to test antibodies quickly and cheaply against molecular targets of interest to biopharma customers.

The business evolved. AI emerged. One of the key questions five years ago was how to feed AI with relevant data sets from wet labs, so it would have quality data that’s the essential grist for machine learn from. Absci embraced the new tool with an eye toward using it to speed up discovery of biologics drug candidates. It decided to discover and develop its own medicines.

Absci is now a public company. It has 200 employees. McClain, as the founder/CEO, has raised more than $530 million. The company is preparing to take its first drug candidate, an antibody against TL1a for inflammatory bowel disease, into clinical testing in 2025.

This wouldn’t be a first in class medicine – there are two other notable antibody programs against TL1a that are further ahead in development, and which were recently acquired by Merck and Roche. The AI drug discovery wave has had some big ups and downs over the last five years. McClain is one of the entrepreneurs out there seeking to strike a balance between the optimistic sense of what’s possible, tempered with the knowledge of how little we still know about biology, and how far AI still has to go in drug discovery.

This was an interesting conversation that I think is both uplifting and grounding at the same time, if that makes any sense. 

Now please join me and Sean McClain on The Long Run.