SeaX Ventures, a venture capital firm focused on Southeast Asia, is continuing to invest in RyboDyn, a biotech startup based in the United States.
This investment is part of RyboDyn’s $10 million seed funding round.
Critically, RyboDyn’s novel cryptic targets represent an entirely uncontested target landscape. While established oncology targets each have hundreds of drugs in development, the therapies are inherently limited to patients who express those targets. HER2, for example, is present in only ~15-20% of breast cancer patients, leaving the majority of breast cancer patients without access to viable targeted immunotherapies. In contrast, RyboDyn’s cryptic targets expand beyond conventional target space, enabling novel, tumor-specific therapies for broader patient populations.
“It’s clear that the molecules we’re finding and describing for the first time represent a vast opportunity to tackle some of the most aggressive cancers,” said Dr. Corey Dambacher, President and Co-founder of RyboDyn. “In a cohort of HER2-negative breast cancer patients, we identified a novel target present in approximately 45% of the tumors we analyzed. Some of these are triple-negative patients with limited treatment options. That’s the value proposition of our approach; the integration of RyboCypher™ with CypherAtlas™ allows us to identify entirely new, actionable targets.”
The company has already demonstrated proof-of-concept in vitro, including the first-ever ADC-mediated killing of tumor cells via a cryptic protein target—a milestone that helped catalyze the current financing. “RyboDyn is tackling one of the most underexplored frontiers in cancer biology,” said Eric Woersching, Managing Partner, at Massive Tech Ventures, a new institutional investor in the round. “Their ability to systematically discover and validate targets from the dark proteome at this scale is highly differentiated. This new therapeutic landscape represents a fundamental shift in how cancer is targeted and RyboDyn is pioneering this shift.”
RyboDyn is working to find new ways to treat diseases by studying hidden proteins in the human body that are usually missed by traditional methods. Using its own platform, RyboCypher™, which combines sequencing and AI, the company can discover new disease-related targets and develop new antibody-based treatments, especially for cancer and other serious diseases.
The company uses licensed technology from Oregon Health & Science University and its Knight Cancer Institute. RyboDyn is based at Lilly Gateway Labs in San Diego and is part of NVIDIA Inception Program. It is also working with Moffitt Cancer Center to support its research and development.
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