Tony Kulesa

Ormoni Accelerates Peptide Drug Discovery to 30-Day Scale

Tirzepatide was the 7,023rd peptide in Lilly’s GLP-1 series. In its first year, Ormoni Biosciences synthesized and assayed more than 250,000 unique peptides. John Casey, Brad Pentelute, and the Ormoni team are bringing a step change to the development of new peptides. There are hundreds of peptides that could treat disease, or enhance our health and longevity, but the challenge is making peptides into medicines: half-life, biodistribution, and uptake. Optimizing these properties requires many slow, expensive design-build-test cycles in animals. Ormoni’s technology takes an idea to thousands of peptide candidates run in parallel in animal models in just 30 days. We will approach timelines to NHP and human PoC that have previously been unheard of in pharmaceuticals. And with this collective dataset, we are training the most capable design and prediction AI models in the industry. I met both founders John Casey and Brad Pentelute while at MIT, 13 years ago. John went on to co-found Inari Agriculture and Sail Biomedicines at Flagship Pioneering; I turned to him for advice many times on company building (and always with fingers crossed that one day we might work together). Brad welcomed me into his chemical biology class at MIT back in 2013, when my PhD advisor told me I should eat my vegetables and finally learn some chemistry. I loved it and was obsessed with his work for a decade; in the meantime Brad has become one of the world’s most renowned peptide chemists. Pillar is proud to support the team.