On October 3, 2024, Integrated Biosciences, a biotechnology company pioneering the use of synthetic biology and machine learning to develop next-generation therapeutics for age-related diseases, announced that it had closed a $17.2 million seed financing, led by Sutter Hill Ventures.

MolBio graduate and postdoc alum, Max Wilson *15, currently Assistant Professor in the University of California Santa Barbara's (UCSB) Department of Molecular, Cellular, and Developmental Biology (MCDB), is Co-founder of Integrated Biosciences and will take his first sabbatical to work as Chief Scientific Officer of the 2022 startup.

As stated in the company's October 3, 2024 press release, "'We started Integrated Biosciences to make real progress toward achieving healthier human aging,' said Felix Wong, Ph.D., Integrated Biosciences Co-founder and CEO. 'The new capital will significantly advance our efforts toward this ambitious goal by enabling us to scale up our synthetic biology and AI platform while investing in the clinical development of our small-molecule portfolio.'

'Drug discovery is broken, and we are here to fix it,' said Wilson. 'Our synthetic biology platform gives us access to the purest stress responses, that alongside our chemistry and AI platforms allows us to rapidly produce small molecule leads that modulate these stress responses in novel ways. What this means is that we can get more selective, structurally unique drug candidates faster by years, significantly increasing the efficiency of drug candidate development.'"

Wilson, after graduating from Swarthmore College, received his Ph.D. degree in Molecular Biology at Princeton University in 2015 under the supervision of Zemer Gitai and Ned Wingreen where he combined theoretical and experimental techniques to understand the role of mesoscale structures in metabolism and cell death. He continued his post-doctoral studies at Princeton working with Jared Toettcher where he developed cellular optogenetic tools to dissect how information is transmitted from signaling pathways through the central dogma. Max joined the UCSB faculty in the Fall of 2018.

Read the full press release here.