Madison’s Immuto Scientific snaps up $2.3M investment round

By Emilie Heidemann, Wisconsin State Journal

A Madison startup developing a way to reduce the time it takes to bring medicines to market — which could significantly mitigate the next big pandemic — has received a $2.3 million investment to move into a larger space.

Immuto Scientific, founded in 2018, has created a quicker, cheaper and more precise method to map out the structures of proteins, which can help develop treatments for cancer as well as pathogens such as SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, said startup co-founder and CEO Faraz Choudhury.

Traditional methods for analyzing proteins are complex and take up to a year, and the process of making drugs that actually reach the market can span a decade. But customers using the Immuto method can get an accurate snapshot of a protein in two to three weeks, he said.

That small window of time is enough to greatly influence patient recovery outcomes, and curtail the millions of dollars businesses pour into protein analysis alone, Choudhury said. Read more …