Flagship Pioneering-founded Ampersand Biomedicines has raised $65 million in Series B financing with significant backing from pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly and Company, alongside other investors. The funding will accelerate development of the company's computational platform designed to create more targeted therapeutic delivery systems.
The Boston-based biotech, launched in 2021 with $50 million in initial funding from Flagship Pioneering, is developing what it calls "smarter medicines" that act specifically at disease sites while avoiding healthy tissues. This approach aims to solve one of medicine's most persistent challenges: delivering drugs precisely where they're needed in the body.
"Our fundraise represents a pivotal milestone in Ampersand's journey and affirms our vision to reimagine what's possible with programmed biologics," said Jason Gardner, D.Phil., CEO and Director of Ampersand Biomedicines and CEO-Partner at Flagship Pioneering.
Pipeline Advancement and Strategic Partnerships
The new capital will support Ampersand's computationally powered Address, Navigate, Determine (AND)™ Platform, which programs what the company calls AND-Body™ Therapeutics. These biologics are engineered to localize to specific targets and conditionally activate biological mechanisms only at disease sites.
Two lead programs are advancing toward IND-enabling studies in 2025 – one focused on immuno-inflammation and another on immuno-oncology. While specific targets remain undisclosed, Gardner indicated they are improved versions of existing drug candidates.
"Basically, they came from drugs that we knew were active, but they had some challenges," Gardner explained. "They didn't work well enough at the right dose, so they had some off-target effects."
The company has also expanded its strategic partnerships, notably:
- A collaboration with Pfizer initiated in November 2023 to develop targeted weight-loss drugs
- A second obesity-focused discovery partnership with Pioneering Medicines, Flagship Pioneering's pharmaceutical partnering division
- The acquisition of Czech firm AbCheck, which brought antibody discovery capabilities to enhance Ampersand's targeting technology
Computational Approach to Drug Design
Ampersand's platform takes a data-driven approach to drug design. The company analyzes existing compounds, including their delivery challenges, to design improved molecules using computational methods. Promising candidates identified through in silico modeling are then synthesized and tested in laboratory settings.
"The large amount of data we have that feeds the platform, through training datasets and machine learning, is very powerful," Gardner noted. "We're looking forward to the next chapter."
Expanding Leadership and Vision
The company recently strengthened its leadership team by adding industry veteran Elizabeth Mily to its Board of Directors. Avak Kahvejian, Ph.D., Board Chair and Co-Founder of Ampersand Biomedicines and General Partner at Flagship Pioneering, emphasized the platform's potential impact.
"At Ampersand, we've unlocked a fundamentally novel way to program biologics and in doing so, are ushering in a new era of smarter medicines," said Kahvejian. "We have reached a key inflection point in the development of our AND Platform, and now with the advancement of an initial pipeline of wholly owned and partnered programs, the enormous impact that such a powerful platform enables is materializing."
Addressing a Fundamental Challenge in Medicine
The company's technology aims to tackle what Gardner describes as "one of the single biggest challenges in medicine today" – getting drugs to the right place in the body. By engineering biologics that can precisely target disease sites while minimizing off-target effects, Ampersand hopes to improve both efficacy and safety profiles of therapeutic agents.
The versatility of the AND Platform allows Ampersand to simultaneously target multiple disease areas. With molecular addresses for numerous tissue and cell targets, the company sees significant opportunities to expand its pipeline and form additional partnerships.
As precision medicine continues gaining momentum in the pharmaceutical industry, Ampersand's approach represents a potentially significant advancement in how biologics are designed and delivered. The Eli Lilly investment particularly signals growing interest from established pharmaceutical companies in next-generation drug delivery technologies.
