Meet a CoMotion Labs Member: Modulus Therapeutics

Welcome to our blog series, “Meet a CoMotion Labs Member.” These posts offer a peek into the groundbreaking work CoMotion Labs startups do and why they do it here. CoMotion Labs provides a multi-industry incubation environment for early-stage startups with a focus on UW spinoffs. Stay tuned for profiles about startups that work in one of our three incubators on the UW Seattle campus, each focusing on a particular industry sector: life sciences and hardware in Fluke Hall, and technology in Startup Hall.

Modulus Therapeutics

Where: CoMotion Labs life sciences incubator

Joined: May 2021

Who:

Max Darnell – CEO
Bryce Daines – CTO
Mary Young – Director of Biology
Brian Belmont – Head of Discovery Platform
Lan Guo – Head of Data Science

What is your startup all about?

Modulus is using high throughput experimentation and machine learning to design new anti-cancer cell therapies.

What problem do you solve?

Cell therapies are a promising new treatment for many types of cancer. However, it’s really challenging to design new versions of effective therapies because so much is still not understood about the core biology of these cells and the cancers that they’re designed to treat.

What’s the latest?

We’re currently building our platform that will allow us to computationally explore many candidate cell therapy designs. We raised a seed round in the early summer and have been building out the team since August.

Do you have any startup advice?

Not sure that we qualify for advice-giving yet, but something we’ve had reinforced recently is the importance of being proactive about getting in front of potential customers, listening to their pain points, and constantly updating your views on what they need to address those challenges, how we can deliver those solutions, and what the economics need to be to make it work.