Attovia CEO Tao Fu is the featured CEO of the Illumina Ventures Spotlight Series for November.  Mr. Fu is the founder and CEO of Attovia, and brings over 25 years of Business Development, General Management, Operations, Strategy, and Commercial leadership experience in the pharmaceutical industry to the company.

In this 3-minute read Mr. Fu discusses how Attovia was spawned from a friendship, the impact its technology can have on immune-mediated diseases, and how the investment from Illumina Ventures is more than just capital, it’s an opportunity for collaboration.


What is your origin story? What led you to create Attovia?

Tao Fu: 

Attovia is a young biotech company based in the San Francisco Bay Area, and we were founded about 15 months ago. As a company, we focus on developing first-in-class and best-in-class bispecifics and multispecifics in immunology and inflammation, or people call it I&I sometimes. We leverage our proprietary Attobody technology which is ideally suited for such applications.

This Attobody technology was invented by Alamar Biosciences, which is an Illumina Venture’s portfolio company. And the CEO, Yuling Luo, is a very good friend of mine. So, when I was a venture partner at Frazier Healthcare about two years ago, Yuling and I connected, and I really thought there would be very interesting potential for this technology to really develop a best-in-class biologics. As you know, Alamar is a next-generation proteomics company. When they developed the technology initially, they intended to use that to do high-sensitivity protein detection for diagnostic use. But Yuling and I had the foresight to see that there was great potential in using this technology to develop therapeutics.

We spun out 100% of the therapeutic use of this technology into a separate company and incubated a couple of proof of platform projects, which eventually become the initial assets for Attovia. We took a few months to do that before we officially raised the $60 million Series A. It was interesting to move from a diagnostic application to create a novel therapeutic company.


What type of impact do you believe Attovia will have on healthcare?

Tao Fu: 

The whole modality of bispecific and multispecific has the potential to transform I&I patient care. Just to give you some examples of the type of diseases we work on, this would include inflammatory dermatology disease like atopic dermatitis, psoriasis, and chronic urticaria. We are also working on inflammatory bowel diseases like Crohn's disease or Ulcerative Colitis. These are very large therapeutic categories and in the United States this is over a hundred-billion-dollar market and growing very fast. Bispecific has the potential to transform the care of this type of disease because it can simultaneously hit different disease pathways. It can broaden your patient reach by targeting heterogeneous patient population from combinations of different disease pathways. And from a pharmacoeconomic perspective, it's also quite appealing when you can build the efficacy of two or more biologics into a single molecule for the price of one. So, if you combine all that, it really has the potential to transform healthcare in a very significant way.


How does Attovia stand out from the competition? In other words, what is your superpower?

Tao Fu:

We have a highly robust and highly differentiated technology platform, the Attobody. We can create highly potent and highly specific molecules. They are also very modular, which is very helpful in developing multispecific and bispecific molecules. We can easily extend the half-life of these molecules to potentially achieve infrequent subcutaneous dosing, like once every quarter. It is ideally suited for developing bispecific and multispecific in I&I, which is a very hot area, and we are really at the right time with the right technology right now.

The discovery process is also very robust and very quick. We can go from concept to a development candidate in 12 months, and we can go from concept to the clinic in 24 months. That is unprecedented speed. We're still less than two years old, but with this top technology platform, we're able to build a diversified pipeline of six assets already with the lead asset going into the clinic imminently. So, it's quite powerful.


What type of opportunities does the Illumina Ventures investment create for Attovia?

Tao Fu:

When we first created a spin-off from Alamar and formed Attovia, Illumina Ventures was one of the major investors in Alamar, and they put some additional money into our new syndicate for Attovia. So, I certainly credit them for the foresight, but also the trust in what we do. We have made a lot of progress over the last 15 months and as I think about taking the company forward, there is also a great opportunity for us to potentially collaborate on companion diagnostics and some of the precision medicines we are trying to do in I&I. And I look forward to those dialogues with the leadership at Illumina Ventures.