Press Releases

SAN LEANDRO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Tierra Biosciences, the company behind the world’s first platform for predictive AI-guided cell-free technology enabling high-throughput on-demand custom protein synthesis, announced today that it closed an $11.4M Series A round.

The investment was led by Material Impact with participation from new and existing investors including Prosus Ventures, In-Q-Tel (IQT), Hillspire, Freeflow Ventures, Creative Ventures, and Social Capital.

Tierra, with established relationships among major pharmaceutical, industrial, and agricultural organizations, will now expand its reach and extend its innovative capabilities to a broader set of customers and partners. The funding will additionally play a pivotal role in advancing Tierra’s predictive AI leveraging the large and growing closed loop synthesis parameter data lake generated from its centralized manufacturing of thousands of proteins.

“Traditional protein engineering using living cells is slow, inefficient, and data poor,” stated Michael Nemzek, Tierra CEO, “Tierra’s cell-free protein production platform will change the game, powering our customers’ discovery efforts with rapid access to large numbers of discrete custom proteins for screening and discovery, plus fast yield scale-up for downstream development and pilot work.”

By pioneering high-throughput cell-free platforms and deploying the latest advancements in AI language models, Tierra utilizes its exclusive data to optimally manufacture revolutionary proteins. This goes beyond the confines of nature, sparking imagination and expanding the realms of what is achievable.

“Tierra's platform propels innovation in the bioeconomy by eliminating bottlenecks in protein discovery and manufacturing. We’re excited to partner with them as they fuse high-throughput manufacturing with artificial intelligence, promising not only to reshape the landscape of protein synthesis but also to revolutionize entire industries,” said Corinna Chen, Partner at Material Impact.

Proteins, essential molecules found across all life forms, exhibit remarkable diversity in both structure and function, stemming from a modest set of amino acid building blocks. Their involvement in nearly every biological process underscores their paramount significance in sustaining life and offering substantial therapeutic value.

“Tierra's cutting-edge platform, powered by advanced cell-free technology, is compelling in its ability to play a key role in building critical bio-infrastructure. We believe the result will be a transformative acceleration of protein design-build-test-learn cycles within the industry,” said Chenny Zhang, Principal, Investments at IQT.

Tierra Biosciences is a global premier provider offering unparalleled access to innovative engineered proteins. Harnessing advanced high-throughput cell-free platform technologies and deploying AI language models, we leverage our proprietary data to engineer and produce transformative proteins that push the boundaries of what's possible, surpassing nature and igniting the imagination. Our mission is rooted in democratizing access to proteins, driving significant advancements in critical sectors such as human health, environmental sustainability, and global food security. Committed to empowering our customers and partners, we're dedicated to revolutionizing the discovery and production of groundbreaking protein products.

Grace Tharmarajah, Ph.D.
press@tierrabiosciences.com
510-352-8600

Company to Provide Broader Access to its AI-Driven Cell-Free Protein Production Platform

Tierra Biosciences Secures $11.4M Series A Funding Round Led by Material Impact

San Leandro, Calif., January 26, 2023 – Tierra Biosciences is pleased to announce the publication of collaborative work - performed with Salesforce and UCSF in Nature Biotechnology, displaying the success of the deep neural language model, ProGen, to generate artificial, functional proteins. 

The publication explores how natural language modeling can improve our understanding of complex protein structures and interactions, enabling the generation of novel proteins, de novo. The work demonstrates that sequences with as little as 31.4% sequence similarity to known naturally evolved proteins exhibit similar catalytic activity and efficiency. This suggests that large-scale generative modeling could play a significant role in unlocking the design of a limitless trove of new proteins. 

By learning the rules of protein structures, scientists can now design proteins more effectively and efficiently. The ability to bypass the limitations of evolution and generate proteins computationally enables scientists to rapidly create novel proteins based on the functions needed for a particular application. This technology enables a new frontier in protein science, driving a transformation in the way we treat disease, address climate change, and produce materials.

Combining the power of artificial intelligence with the versatility of proteins will lead to an explosion in the number of proteins being designed, resulting in the need for faster, more efficient methods for empirically screening physical protein candidates. In this collaborative work with Salesforce and UCSF, Tierra played a key role in validating numerous ProGen-generated designs, using their high-throughput custom protein production platform. As more protein generation models come online, high-throughput physical protein screening will play an essential role in discovering and validating new, useful sequences for a variety of applications. 

“Tierra’s high-throughput protein synthesis platform played an essential role in rapidly providing us with the data needed to validate our natural language model, ProGen. We sent Tierra protein sequences and quickly received invaluable expression and activity data, proving our model can successfully generate functional artificial proteins” – Nikhil Naik, Director of Research, Salesforce

“Being able to validate hundreds of proteins from sequences alone in 4 weeks or less really changes the cadence of impact of computational protein design. We are excited to partner with Salesforce and UCSF to highlight the power of computational protein design and on-demand cell-free protein synthesis.”  – Zachary Sun, CSO and Co-founder of Tierra Biosciences

Read the paper to learn more about the exciting work from the collaboration between Salesforce, UCSF , and Tierra.

Tierra Biosciences is focused on democratizing the world’s access to proteins to accelerate the pace of discovering and producing the next generation of bioengineered products. Tierra couples rapid, high-throughput protein manufacturing with the simplicity and ease of web-based customer access. By leveraging cell-free protein production and artificial intelligence, Tierra lowers the barriers to protein synthesis, transforming the way people screen, discover, develop, and produce novel proteins. Tierra is dedicated to serving scientists looking to make world-changing discoveries with bio-based solutions across therapeutics, food and agriculture, materials production, and environmental science.

For more information, visit https://www.tierrabiosciences.com/neural-language-protein-modeling. 

Alexis Jacobs
Email: alexis@tierrabiosciences.com
Phone: 510-352-8600

Generating functional proteins designed using novel artificial intelligence in collaboration with Salesforce and UCSF

San Leandro, Calif., May 03, 2022 – Tierra Biosciences announced today that Michael Nemzek has joined the company as its new Chief Executive Officer. Nemzek brings over 30 years of senior executive experience in growing early-stage life science companies and creating multibillion-dollar value for shareholders.

“The market for high throughput on-demand proteins is an unrealized opportunity, and Tierra is positioned to meet this demand. I am confident that Mike is the right leader to reach new customers across multiple high-value sectors, transforming the industry in the process,” said Corinna Chen, lead-investor and partner at Material Impact, Tierra Board member, and outgoing interim CEO.

Prior to joining Tierra, Nemzek was the Chief Commercial Officer at Synthego Corporation where he led the dramatic commercial expansion and growth of its CRISPR genome engineering business. Nemzek brings a proven record of achieving rapid commercial growth across a range of biotechnology companies, having grown several successful startups that have become public companies by merger.

“I am delighted to join Tierra as its CEO,” said Nemzek. “Providing our customers with an infinite range of custom proteins produced at high throughput, selected through an easy-to-use web interface unleashes enormous potential to create value across major areas including therapeutics, food, textiles, consumer goods, and energy. I am excited to work with the talented Tierra team as we further capitalize the company and continue to innovate, scale operations, and more widely serve our customer base.”

The Tierra Protein Platform is an industry-first e-commerce portal that allows customers to accelerate their research and development by ordering unprecedented numbers of custom proteins in just a few clicks and having them delivered quickly, supplying a more effective solution than alternatives. “We’re extremely excited Mike has joined our team as CEO,” said Zachary Sun, co-founder and CSO of Tierra. “Mike brings the right leadership skills and experience to broadly commercialize Tierra’s platform and ensure we have the necessary resources to fuel the next phase of growth for the company.”

Tierra Biosciences is a synthetic biology company that accelerates the pace of discovery to enable the next generation of bioengineered products. Tierra’s first commercially available offering, the Tierra Protein Platform, couples high-throughput protein manufacturing with the simplicity of e-commerce to make ordering custom proteins fast and easy. By leveraging cell-free protein production and artificial intelligence, Tierra lowers the traditional protein synthesis barrier, transforming the way people discover, screen, and develop novel proteins. Tierra is a fast-growing company of protein experts that is serving scientists looking to make world-changing discoveries with bio-based solutions.

For more information, visit www.tierrabiosciences.com.

Tierra Biosciences Appoints Michael Nemzek as Chief Executive Officer

The platform packages advanced high-throughput cell-free protein manufacturing and protein design technologies in an easy-to-use online shopping portal for synthetic biologists, drug developers and researchers working on everything from petrochemical-free fashion/textiles and cruelty-free cosmetics to novel flavors and aromas for FoodTech.

San Leandro, Calif., February 02, 2022 — Tierra Biosciences today announced the launch of the Tierra Protein Platform, an industry-first eCommerce portal that allows customers to get custom proteins synthesized, validated, and shipped to them in just a few clicks. Tierra’s platform provides a faster, more convenient solution than traditional methods for sourcing thousands of proteins for research and development.

“The next major biological frontier after genomics is proteins, given their diverse form and function, from converting carbon dioxide to starch to fighting infections in our body,” said Zachary Sun, Ph.D., co-founder and Chief Scientific Officer of Tierra. “However, there is a lack of expedient research tools and ordering platforms for protein engineers, which can create significant time and cost bottlenecks for critical synthetic biology research.

“We specifically developed the Tierra Protein Platform to solve these bottlenecks and give everyone a convenient way to access a diverse range of proteins — even ones that are impossible to produce in common laboratory cells,” continued Dr. Sun. “We believe this will significantly lower the barrier-to-entry for protein synthesis, thereby enabling researchers and moving the synthetic biology field forward.”

Customers can enter up to 10,000 digital protein sequences into the company’s easy-to-use online portal. Tierra’s proprietary artificial intelligence (AI) system then analyzes the input to assess whether the proteins contain regions incompatible with the manufacturing system. From there, the company uses a cell-free manufacturing process to synthesize the final proteins, which are then shipped after extensive quality control and experimental validation. By taking the protein-synthesizing elements out of living bacteria, reliance on these organisms is eliminated, and efficiency and throughput are substantially increased.

Tierra’s disruptive, scalable protein synthesis platform has already been operating at a commercial scale, serving customers across industries and geographies working on everything from petrochemical-free fashion/textiles and cruelty-free cosmetics to novel flavors and aromas for FoodTech. Salesforce, one of the company’s earliest customers, approached Tierra to synthesize and test over 500 synthetic proteins.

“It is exciting to consider what Tierra will enable in the field of computational biology,” said Ali Madani, a Senior Research Scientist at Salesforce. “Our work had generated thousands of computationally designed proteins but we had no simple way to empirically validate them.

Tierra’s platform was the missing piece to our research stack, providing invaluable data and insights that have carried our research forward faster than would otherwise be possible.”

For more information about the Tierra Protein Platform, please visit tierrabiosciences.com.

About Tierra Biosciences
Tierra Biosciences is a synthetic biology company that accelerates the pace of discovery and enables the next generation of bio-based materials. Tierra’s first product, the Tierra Protein Platform, couples high-throughput protein manufacturing with the simplicity of e-commerce to make ordering custom proteins easier than ever before. By lowering the traditional protein synthesis barrier, Tierra serves scientists looking to change the world with novel proteins. Led by a team of protein experts, this fast-growing company is transforming the way people discover, screen, and develop proteins for future bio-based products. For more information, visit tierrabiosciences.com.

Media Contact:
John Kang
Email: john.kang@hdmz.com
Phone: 309-310-4537

Press Releases

Tierra Biosciences Secures $11.4M Series A Funding Round Led by Material Impact

Generating functional proteins designed using novel artificial intelligence in collaboration with Salesforce and UCSF

Tierra Biosciences Appoints Michael Nemzek as Chief Executive Officer

Tierra Biosciences Launches First-Ever Online Protein Ordering Platform for Synthetic Biology Protein Engineering

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