Terrain Biosciences emerges from stealth to enable faster therapeutics and vaccine development with better RNA

– Founded by Professors Omar Abudayyeh, Jonathan Gootenberg, and Patrick Hsu leveraging novel AI models and technologies for designing, building, and delivering RNA
– Raised $9M in seed funding from notable investors including Magnetic Ventures, Bruker Corporation, and Josef Feldman of Ex Nihilo as well as prominent biotech leaders including John Maraganore, Hans Bishop, and John Evans 
– Already delivering RNA design and build 3-6x faster than industry standards for over a dozen therapeutics companies 
– Learn more and connect with Terrain’s design and build team at terrainbiosciences.com

CAMBRIDGE, Mass., Feb. 12, 2025 /PRNewswire/ — Terrain Biosciences launches from stealth today as the world’s first RNA design-build company, using advanced AI and its proprietary manufacturing platform to accelerate development of the next generation of programmable medicines. RNA-based modalities, including mRNA, cell & gene therapies, and emerging personalized cancer vaccines are promising and rapidly advancing, with hundreds of drug candidates in development for indications ranging from oncology to infectious disease to neurodegenerative illnesses. Despite incredible progress, innovators in the space continue to face challenges in designing, selecting, manufacturing, and delivering optimal customized RNA sequences for therapeutic benefit.

Founded by Professors Omar Abudayyeh and Jonathan Gootenberg of Harvard Medical School and Professor Patrick Hsu of the Arc Institute and University of California, Berkeley, the company is led by industry veterans including CSO Aaron Larsen (formerly at Beam & Moderna), COO Ted Tisch (formerly at Mammoth Biosciences and Synthego), and founding CEO Chetan Tadvalkar (veteran GM/COO of pharma services companies, including former head of business operations at Ginkgo Bioworks). Terrain has raised $9M in seed funding to bring cutting-edge research in RNA design and manufacturing to innovators building RNA-based therapies and vaccines, and support development of personalized cancer vaccines. Over a dozen biotechs already trust Terrain Bio to help them identify and produce sequences with better expression, greater durability, and optimal manufacturability, accelerating their path to the clinic.

“AI is poised to dramatically accelerate how we design and develop drugs, but the reality is that in silico models can only get us so far in RNA — bringing a drug from the lab to the clinic requires bringing advanced science into the real world. Our partners need excellent machine learning tools combined with a real manufacturing platform and data to enable and accelerate their path to the clinic,” said Terrain co-founder Omar Abudayyeh.

“Our partners are brilliant scientists on an incredibly challenging journey to develop new medicines and ultimately help patients,” said Chetan Tadvalkar, CEO of Terrain. “Our team has been part of similar journeys before, and today our purpose is to help scientists navigate the complexity of designing the right RNA sequence and guide them towards their goal while ensuring they hit key preclinical milestones.”

RNA optimization is critical for therapeutic efficacy and safety — sequence and purity reaches beyond the mechanism of action to have broad impacts across expression, stability, durability, immunogenicity, and manufacturability. “The search space for designing RNA is nearly infinite,” said co-founder Jonathan Gootenberg. “Navigating that space computationally and experimentally will unlock enormous potential in medicine, but remains incredibly challenging given the lack of top-quality data for training better models.”

“Bridging design and manufacturing in a tight feedback loop means higher quality preclinical data, which means stronger generative models for design, which means better drug candidates,” said co-founder Patrick Hsu. “Terrain is all about making the tools for this kind of rapid iteration possible for delivering better RNA.”

About Terrain Bio

Terrain Bio helps RNA therapeutics companies design and build better RNA, faster. Founded by innovators Omar Abudayyeh, Jonathan Gootenberg, and Patrick Hsu, along with Ex Nihilo, Terrain’s mission is to enable better RNA therapeutics and vaccines. Leveraging the latest innovations in protein and RNA design and the deep expertise of its scientific cofounders, Terrain brings unparalleled speed and quality to RNA manufacturing. High-quality RNA enables the generation of experimental data that trains novel machine-learning models for RNA sequence design, creating a sandbox for scientists to design and build their own sequences. Through a catalog of commonly used sequences, custom RNA build, and AI-guided sequence design tools, drug developers gain access to a wealth of resources for every step of the journey to the clinic and beyond, with confidence that their sequences will be optimized for safety, efficacy, and manufacturability.

Better RNA is possible. Learn more at terrainbiosciences.com.

Media contact
press@terrainbiosciences.com

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SOURCE Terrain Biosciences, Inc.