Tl;dr:

• Ligo is using deep learning to design novel enzymes to make chemical manufacturing cheaper and more sustainable.
• The three founders met in a synbio lab at Oxford University where they decided to take on the $6 trillion chemicals industry.
• Sign up for our waitlist (Big news soon!)

The Team:

Hey - we are Ed, Emily, and Arda! We are building Ligo.

👨🏻‍⚕️CEO, Ed — Ed studied CS at Princeton before transferring to Oxford Medical School, where he worked across three top synthetic biology labs. Ed bootstrapped his first startup at 19 in the food markets of Guadalajara, Mexico, and took it to $1M in annual revenue.

👩‍🔬CSO, Emily — Emily is a top biochemist from Oxford University who honed her wet lab skills in the intensive environment of biotech startups. Working on everything from bacterial biofuel production to vaccine design, Emily is happiest with a pipette in hand!

👨‍💻CTO, Arda — Arda studied cell and systems biology at Oxford, where he became a Google Cloud Research Innovator for his work in computational biology. Arda’s obsession with deep learning for biomolecular design began when the original AlphaFold paper was released.

❌ The problem:

(1) The $6 trillion chemicals industry is flawed:

• This industry produces 20% of industrial greenhouse gases and is responsible for 15% of global energy usage.
• Traditional chemical manufacturing relies on hazardous materials and produces huge amounts of waste, resulting in high costs.
• You unknowingly contribute to this problem by personally using ~160 of these chemicals daily.

(2) Enzymes offer an amazing solution, but they are hard to develop

• Enzymes are biological catalysts. They accelerate reactions at mild temperatures and pressures, making chemical manufacturing cheaper, faster, and more sustainable.
• Major pharmaceutical companies already use enzymes for manufacturing a limited number of drugs but developing them costs tens of millions of dollars and takes multiple years.
• Current enzyme engineering approaches are limited because they must start from an enzyme that already exists.
• No models currently understand the principles of catalysis, resulting in a narrow range of possible reactions that can be catalysed.

✅ Our Solution: Enzymes Designed From Scratch

• We are building foundational enzyme design models that learn from huge amounts of data to understand the principles of catalysis.
• The model generates structures capable of catalysing reactions directly from transition state models, meaning we will expand the number of reactions that can feasibly be accelerated using enzymes.
• These enzymes can catalyse reactions to synthesise high-value chemicals used in the pharmaceutical, agriculture, and consumer goods industries.

Our Diffusion Model

Partnerships:

We are happy to announce two key partnerships.

• Basecamp Research is on track to have 1000x more sequence diversity than public resources - We are collaborating to use their data to improve our soon-to-be-released OpenSource model (sign up here!).
• Adaptyv Bio is building a next-generation protein foundry. Their engineers, Liza and Igor, are helping to build the data pipeline for OpenSource model using their state-of-the-art bioinformatics tool, ProteinFlow.

We’d Love Your Help❤️

• Sign up for our waitlist (Big news soon!)
• We’d love intros to:
  • Small chemical companies in pharmaceuticals, fragrances, food&drink, detergents
  • Big Pharma and Agricultural chemical companies
  • Any other biotech companies! Email us ed@ligo.bio