Porton partners with BioMap for AI-based gene therapies

Suzhou Porton Advanced will partner with BioMap – an AI company that has developed the Xtrimo platform that offers Large Language Models – to predict the behavior of proteins.

The collaboration will use Porton Advanced’s novel Adeno-Associated Virus (AAV) vector technology platform and relevant research data to develop AAV assembly efficiency models and an assembly distribution model. The two companies plan to build large-scale life science models that speed up the integration of experimental platforms and intelligent big data analysis platforms.

BioMap is headquartered in Menlo Park, California with operations in Singapore, Beijing and Suzhou. Financial details of the agreement were not disclosed.

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Porton Advanced offers a cGMP-compliant manufacturing platform for plasmids, cell therapy, gene therapy, oncolytic virus, mRNA therapy and bacterial therapy. The company is a subsidiary of contract development and manufacturing organization (CDMO) Porton Pharma Solutions.

BioMap’s platform xTrimo is short for: Cross-Modal Transformer Representation of Interactome and Multi-Omics. The two companies plan to expand the application of AI models for gene therapies.

Over the past decade, gene therapies using AAV vectors have evolved significantly. However, despite these achievements, the creation of tissue-specific AAV coat proteins, a key step towards unlocking their therapeutic potential, is still not solved. The hope is AI will address that problem.

“We are extremely optimistic about the future development of gene therapies and feel honored to work with Porton Advanced to jointly establish an artificially designed gene delivery system to help more partners,” said Vicky Qu, Senior Vice President of BioMap.

“BioMap’s large pre-trained foundation model, xTrimo, can quickly generate the best-performing task models across various fields based on our partners’ diversified data. Meanwhile, Porton Advanced’s high-quality AAV vector technology platform and research data will significantly improve our model performance, enabling innovative design of high-performing AAV vectors.”

Yangzhou Wang, CEO of Porton Advanced, added, “We are very excited to cooperate with BioMap to provide better solutions for gene therapy research by using AI models. While Porton Advanced has a well-established CDMO platform, we also established proprietary technical platforms, such as a new-type library of AAV capsid variants AAVantage, as well as other gene-editing tools.”

Founded in 2020 by Robin Li and Wei Liu, BioMap’s Xtrimo platform allows scientists to model life more accurately, from proteins to a system level, and extract novel insights and predictions from limited data. Supported by an international, cross-functional team of over 300 experts, BioMap solves critical, protein-related drug development problems.

Porton Advanced offers Gene and Cell Therapeutics (GCT) manufacturing. It offers innovative manufacturing answers to the complex challenges of GCT production.

A version of this article was first published in ChinaBio Today on November 8, 2023