The overwhelming demand for GLP-1 weight loss drugs has reshaped the drug market, empowering consumers to take charge of their own health and removing barriers between their wallets and their medicine cabinets.
Tucked in a corner of the Pacific Northwest, far from the biotech hubs of San Francisco and Boston, sits an AI-focused biotech that has recently endeavored to put consumers at the heart of its nascent drug development efforts. Absci may have gotten its start in a basement instead of a garage, but CEO Sean McClain sees potential for his 15-year-old company to become the Apple of the biotech industry.
“Every few years you come out with a new iPhone that has new capabilities, all for the same price,” McClain told Fierce from the company’s Vancouver, Washington, headquarters. “What would that look like for Absci?”
New and improved versions of the biotech’s lead asset, ABS-201, could be rolled out periodically, he mused. Currently in development for male pattern hair loss and endometriosis, both already massive markets, a theoretical future iteration could be combined with a GLP-1 to offer hair regrowth and weight loss in one convenient package.
“You’re continuously giving the consumer an upgraded drug for the same price, and we think that’s going to create long-term sustainable value,” McClain said.
But before than can happen, ABS-201 has to succeed in hair loss and endometriosis—not exactly easy nuts to crack. The first has hardly even been considered a disease until recently, while the latter has vexed drug developers and frustrated patients who have largely been gaslit and ignored by the medical system.
Losing hair can equate to a loss of identity, McClain said, with patients no longer feeling like themselves. Absci is now working with a professor at Harvard University on the mental health effects of pattern hair loss, he added.
For endometriosis, a diagnosis takes an average of seven years, McClain said, and “it’s a highly inflammatory, highly painful disease that also affects fertility.”
The condition, characterized by the growth of uterine tissue outside of the uterus, is “absolutely a devastating disease, and standard of care is non-existent.”
Though it took time for Absci, founded in 2011, to begin developing its own pipeline, its CEO told Fierce the company’s mission has remained the same: “engineering biology better for patients.”
Don’t call it a gong show
Absci’s headquarters sit just across the Columbia River from Portland, in a business district with nary another biotech company in sight. At the time of Fierce’s Friday afternoon visit, Ryan Gutenkunst, Ph.D., a molecular biologist from McClain’s alma mater, the University of Arizona, was giving a lunchtime talk to the company’s staff about his lab’s work on genetic mutation rates.
Such talks happen about once a month, McClain said, featuring either visiting speakers or internal presentations by Absci staff.
Next to the lunching Absci employees sat a gong, impossible to miss, which is rung whenever the company hits a significant milestone. The gong most recently sounded in June, when the biotech secured $100 million from a stock offering that included a $40 million investment from Eli Lilly.
And wandering the room seeking love and affection was Chief Morale Officer Penelope, McClain’s Boston terrier.
The set-up is a far cry from the basement of McClain’s parents’ house in Portland, where he started Absci after finishing college in 2011. Back then, his focus was on engineering E. coli bacteria to more efficiently produce antibodies. This led to a platform that could not only screen antibodies for desired functions, he told Fierce, but also the cell lines needed to make those antibodies.
“You could optimize for the cell line and the actual drug itself all at the same time,” McClain recalled. “That led to some of the early adoption of AI in 2018, when Google came out with the Transformer.”
That model laid the foundation for the current large-language model boom that has taken many industries, including biotech, by storm.
With generative AI, “you could really go from this paradigm where you’re searching for a needle in a haystack to actually being able to create and design the antibody with the attributes that you wanted,” McClain said.
It was this early AI adoption that enabled Absci to pivot to developing its own drugs, and the company is now working on an AI co-scientist called Atlas to further speed drug development. But the motivation for making medicines of its own came from the recognition that with pharma partnerships, many promising molecules are never given the old college try.
“They don’t really care about super early-stage pipeline programs,” McClain said. “They just decide ‘portfolio review’ and kill it.”
“We believe in the technology. We believe it’s differentiated,” he said. “Now let’s just take the drug development into our own hands and really own that and really create the value.”
A hairy situation
AI by itself isn’t enough to develop a compelling drug; the biology also has to check out. The science behind ABS-201 came to Absci with a Big Pharma pedigree, originating in the Bayer laboratory of Absci’s recently retired chief innovation officer, Andreas Busch, Ph.D.
Busch was studying the role of prolactin, a pituitary hormone most associated with lactation but found in all people, in endometriosis. Serendipitously, McClain said, when Busch’s team targeted prolactin in mice, they found the rodents also regrew hair faster.
“They took it into this stump-tail macaque, these monkeys that naturally go bald, and within six months of treatment, they had a full head of hair,” McClain said.
When Bayer decided not to pursue prolactin any further, Busch absconded to Absci, leading to ABS-201.
Though Busch did pioneering work for ABS-201, prolactin’s importance is readily apparent to anyone willing to put the pieces of the scientific literature together. But the hormone has largely been overlooked, which McClain blames partially on its name.
“When you find it in single cell sequencing or immunologists find it in the joints of [rheumatoid arthritis] patients, you're like, ‘well, that’s odd,’ and just disregard it,” the CEO said.
Ransi Somaratne, M.D., Absci’s new chief medical officer who joined in March from Vertex Pharmaceuticals, told Fierce that this narrow view of prolactin gets its start in medical school.
“All you learn about prolactin is it’s made in the pituitary, controls lactation, breast development,” Somaratne said. Many don’t realize that the hormone is found outside the breasts, he said, and that men make it too. “Absolutely overlooked.”
Somaratne joined a conversation with Fierce and McClain via video chat while sitting in an airport lounge on the other side of the world. The veteran of Vertex, BioMarin and Amgen was in Australia to check in on Absci’s ongoing phase 1 trial of ABS-201 for pattern hair loss.
“We come down here every couple months just to make sure all the i’s are dotted and the t’s are crossed,” Somaratne said. Not only is the trial crucial for hair loss, but the data generated will also fuel a first-in-human endometriosis test that Absci plans to launch later this year.
But these trials are just the tip of the iceberg. Somaratne made the leap to Absci, he told Fierce, because he saw the full potential of the company’s AI-first approach.
“Everyone talks about using AI in drug discovery and development—no one has done it,” he said. “Here’s a company that has taken a molecule from the bench to the bedside faster than I’ve seen anyone do it.”
Retail therapy
McClain can’t say for sure, but he speculates that Bayer may have passed on prolactin partly because the idea of an injectable drug for hair loss was, at the time, deemed a nonstarter for patients. With the rise of GLP-1s for weight loss, though, that all changed.
“With the GLP-1s, with AI, what we’ve seen is the consumer is now taking more responsibility and ownership of their health,” he explained. “They want to feel better. They want to look better.”
Absci’s goal is to commercialize ABS-201, and all other pipeline programs, entirely themselves with a direct-to-consumer model baked in from the start. Appealing to ordinary customers requires a level of brand recognition that even the biggest pharma companies have traditionally lacked, which GLP-1 giant Eli Lilly is now trying to counteract with an aggressive marketing push.
McClain is also trying to get the Absci name on the mind of the average consumer, for now mostly by appearing on relevant podcasts. The company’s efforts at brand building will be bolstered, he said, by how highly motivated hair loss and endometriosis patients are to learn about their diseases and the options available to them.
“They want to understand the intricacies of the biology and how [ABS-201] is different than the standard of care that’s out there,” the CEO said. On a recent podcast with more than 100,000 followers, he added, the host has no medical background “but the detail that he knew about hair was almost better than anybody else I’d ever talked with.”
McClain is also keen to learn from the marketing and DTC wizardry of new Absci investor Lilly. While he’s clear that the Indianapolis drugmaker has no rights to any of Absci’s programs, he isn’t shy about wanting to soak up all the wisdom he can.
“We have the opportunity to get to know each other, and they are in particular helping us on the endometriosis clinical study,” he said. “It was an investment with no strings attached.”
But what if Lilly came knocking with one of their patented billion-dollar offers?
“We want to stay independent,” McClain insisted. To that end, he added, Absci is currently on the hunt for a chief commercialization officer. When one is hired, maybe the person will get the chance to ring Absci’s gong.