Barcelona biotech ALLOX raises €9.4 million seed round led by Asabys

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ALLOX, a Barcelona biotech spun out of the Centre for Genomic Regulation, has closed a seed round of $10.5 million, or €9.4 million. Asabys led through its Sabadell Asabys II fund, joined by CDTI via its Innvierte vehicle and the Institut Català de Finances. The company also named Morten Graugaard as independent chair of its board.

The idea is that a protein's obvious binding spot is not the only place worth targeting. ALLOX measures the effects of thousands of mutations in parallel to map allosteric and other regulatory sites, aiming at targets long considered hard to drug, such as protein-protein interactions inside cells and transcription factors. The money goes to expanding that platform, building its own AI models to predict therapeutically useful sites from its biophysical data, growing the in-house drug discovery team, and assembling a focused set of small-molecule programmes, plus research partnerships with pharma and biotech companies.

Graugaard is business director at Orbis Medicines and a former partner at Novo Holdings. At Lundbeck he led the $658 million purchase of Chelsea Therapeutics, and he has chaired Syndesi Therapeutics, which AbbVie bought for up to $1 billion in 2022. Co-founder and chief executive Júlia Domingo called the financing "un hito importante" for the company's internal pipeline.