Seranova Bio

Seranova Bio is a biotechnology company built around the study of naturally occurring autoantibodies as a source of human-validated therapeutic hypotheses. It licensed REAP (rapid extracellular antigen profiling) from the Yale laboratory of Aaron Ring, an assistant professor of immunobiology who developed the platform and launched the company. REAP screens patient samples against genetically barcoded human extracellular proteins displayed on yeast; yeast cells bound by autoantibodies are isolated and the bound antigens are read out by sequencing the barcodes. The approach was designed to address limitations of peptide and protein arrays and phage display, which fragment proteins and therefore poorly capture antibodies that recognize natively folded extracellular targets with their normal conformations and post-translational modifications.

The company's thesis is that some autoantibodies are protective rather than pathogenic, and that a naturally occurring protective autoantibody functions as a long-duration human perturbation of a specific extracellular target, with linked clinical outcomes revealing the consequence of blocking that target. Examples cited on the company site include anti-TNFα autoantibodies reported in 8% of rheumatoid arthritis patients (associated with reduced erosions of hands or feet), anti-HER2 autoantibodies reported in 15% of invasive breast carcinoma patients (associated with higher likelihood of recurrence-free survival), and high-affinity anti-α-synuclein autoantibodies common in healthy individuals but present at lower levels in Parkinson's disease and multiple system atrophy patients. Seranova combines REAP profiling with clinically linked, longitudinal patient cohorts to identify protective associations and convert them into therapeutic hypotheses. At launch, the stated plan was to build a serological atlas named SeraVista by running REAP on samples from tens of thousands of patients and healthy individuals, correlating autoantibody profiles with health outcomes and phenotypes, and then developing drugs that model the most compelling antibody responses.

Third-party profiles describe the company as developing companion diagnostics or therapeutics for autoimmune disease and other autoantibody-driven diseases, and as an autoantibody biology company developing medicines inspired by biological modifiers within the human reactome.

Founding story

Aaron Ring, an assistant professor of immunobiology at Yale University and lead developer of the REAP platform, launched Seranova Bio as a Yale spinout, with the company reported in a May 2021 article as having been founded roughly a month earlier with seed funding from Foresite Capital. Ring's lab licensed the REAP technology to the company. The founding premise was that autoantibodies are not uniformly pathogenic and that protective autoantibody responses — such as anti-HER2 antibodies produced by some breast cancer patients, or the elderly-donor-derived anti-amyloid-beta antibody underlying Biogen's aducanumab — reveal targets and mechanisms with existing human evidence.

Business model

Seranova Bio operates as a therapeutics discovery company: it applies a licensed platform technology (REAP) to patient cohorts to generate a proprietary autoantibody/serological dataset (SeraVista), and intends to use that dataset to inform its own internal drug development programs. One third-party profile also describes the company as developing companion diagnostics or therapeutics for autoantibody-driven diseases. No revenue-generating products or commercial arrangements are described in the sources.

Traction

Sources describe platform validation and publications rather than commercial traction: a Nature study screening 194 SARS-CoV-2 infected patients and healthcare workers against 2,770 proteins, a BioRxiv preprint screening APECED and SLE patients against 2,688 proteins, a license of REAP from Yale, and an intent to build the SeraVista atlas from tens of thousands of samples. Reported funding includes seed backing from Foresite Capital and a $10.0 million venture round announced in February 2024.

Latest developments

The most recent company-specific datapoints are a $10.0 million venture round recorded as announced in February 2024 and the current company website, which describes REAP profiling combined with clinically linked patient cohorts and lists South San Francisco, CA, with careers posted on LinkedIn.