Alchemab Therapeutics: Harnessing Natural Human Resilience for Drug Discovery

Alchemab Therapeutics is turning traditional drug discovery on its head. Instead of studying what goes wrong in disease, the London-based biotech is studying what goes right in health. Its scientists focus on people who carry genetic risks for serious illnesses yet somehow remain unaffected—people whose immune systems hold clues to natural protection.

By decoding those clues, Alchemab hopes to uncover antibodies and mechanisms that nature has already proven effective. It’s a shift in perspective, but one grounded in rigorous biology and powered by serious data.

From Insight to Impact

Founded in 2019 and headquartered in London, with labs in Cambridge, Alchemab has built a “resilience-first” model for antibody discovery. The company reached an important milestone in September 2025, when it began its first clinical trial—a Phase 1 study of ATLX-1282, its lead candidate for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS) and related neurodegenerative diseases.

At the same time, Alchemab secured a $32 million Series A extension, bringing total Series A investment to $114 million. The combined progress signals a company moving from theory to testing, where biological insight meets clinical evidence.

The work happens inside labs outfitted with single-cell sequencing systems, automated liquid handlers, and high-throughput flow cytometers—the kind of precision tools that make large-scale antibody discovery possible. These systems trace their lineage back to early hybridoma screening and manual immunoassays, but now operate at a vastly different scale, guided by data pipelines rather than petri dishes.

The Science Behind Resilience-Based Discovery

Most biotechs start by examining what goes wrong in patients with disease. Alchemab began with the opposite question: why do some people stay healthy when, genetically, they shouldn’t?

Millions of individuals carry risk variants for devastating conditions yet never get sick. Their bodies harbor antibodies and immune mechanisms that quietly defend against pathology before it starts. Alchemab’s platform isolates those protective antibodies, sequences them, and identifies shared molecular targets that could inspire new therapies.

The process depends on high-resolution immunological analysis: flow cytometers, single-cell sequencing instruments, mass spectrometers, and automated screening platforms that can map B-cell repertoires in extraordinary detail. Once the antibody sequences are captured, AI-driven pattern recognition and structural modeling tools identify recurring motifs across thousands of samples.

In the past, antibody discovery relied on labor-intensive hybridoma techniques and low-throughput assays. Today, advances in next-generation sequencing, computational docking, and AI-guided structure prediction allow teams like Alchemab’s to uncover insights that older methods could never reach. It’s a blend of immunology, computation, and systems biology that reflects how discovery now works in practice.

The DataCube

At the center of Alchemab’s platform is The DataCube, a proprietary AI system designed to search for patterns hidden within the immune system. It draws from more than 6,000 deeply curated patient samples and over 350 million unique B-cell receptor sequences, sourced from collaborations across 30 global institutions.

The idea is simple but powerful: treat the immune repertoire like a vast dataset rather than a mystery. The DataCube uses machine learning models, sequence clustering algorithms, and structural prediction tools to find recurring protective antibodies in people who appear resilient to disease. It’s effectively a search engine for human immunity, one that can connect biological patterns to real clinical outcomes.

Supporting this platform is an extensive laboratory backbone. Teams use automated liquid handlers, NGS sequencers, and high-performance computing clusters to generate and analyze data at scale. The lab’s integration of AI-based antibody modeling with wet-lab validation—through technologies such as biolayer interferometry and surface plasmon resonance—helps confirm which antibodies truly bind and protect.

The combination of real biology and digital inference allows Alchemab to move faster than traditional antibody discovery methods, which often rely on years of incremental screening. Here, data and biology evolve in tandem.

Pipeline & Programs

Alchemab’s pipeline reflects its resilience-first philosophy. Each program begins not with disease samples, but with individuals who resist them—people whose biology carries built-in defenses that can be reverse-engineered into therapies.

Its lead candidate, ATLX-1282, originated from studying individuals with genetic mutations linked to frontotemporal dementia who remained healthy into old age. From those samples, Alchemab identified a protective antibody and traced it to a novel molecular target involved in neuronal survival. The antibody now sits at the center of a Phase 1 clinical trial exploring its potential in ALS and other neurodegenerative disorders.

Behind the scenes, work like this depends on precision tools. Researchers use hybridoma expression systems, cell-based bioassays, and automated binding kinetics platforms such as biolayer interferometry and surface plasmon resonance to confirm how candidate antibodies interact with their targets. Cryo-electron microscopy and X-ray crystallography often follow, revealing structure-function details that guide optimization.

Alchemab’s second program, ATLX-2847, targets the prostaglandin pathway in muscle atrophy. The company plans to advance it toward the clinic using insights gained from its neurodegenerative work. Beyond these, a growing collection of early-stage efforts spans immunology, metabolic disease, and oncology, all anchored by the same logic: decode the biology of resilience, and translate it into protection for others.

Partnering for Scale

Alchemab’s approach has already attracted the attention of major pharmaceutical partners. In May 2025, the company signed a licensing agreement with Eli Lilly and Company worth up to $415 million, covering its lead neurodegenerative candidate, ATLX-1282. Under the deal, Alchemab is leading the Phase 1 program, while Lilly will oversee later-stage development and global commercialization.

Earlier in January 2025, the two companies launched a separate discovery collaboration to identify and develop up to five additional candidates targeting neurodegenerative disease. The agreement pairs Alchemab’s immune-pattern discovery expertise with Lilly’s translational and clinical infrastructure, giving the partnership both speed and scale.

For Alchemab, these partnerships provide more than funding. They validate the platform’s scientific premise and connect a young company’s ingenuity to a global engine capable of bringing therapies to patients. For Lilly, they offer a window into a new way of thinking about biology: studying the immune system’s successes instead of its failures.

Leadership

Guiding Alchemab’s mission is Jane Osbourn, OBE, FMedSci, PhD, co-founder and CEO. A veteran of antibody innovation, Osbourn previously served as Executive Vice President of R&D at MedImmune, where she helped advance multiple biologics from concept to clinic. Her experience blends academic curiosity with the practical discipline of bringing drugs to market.

Under her leadership, Alchemab has secured major partnerships, grown a cross-disciplinary team of immunologists, data scientists, and protein engineers, and advanced its first therapeutic into human trials. The company’s labs in Cambridge combine state-of-the-art wet-lab instrumentation with dedicated computational clusters for large-scale antibody modeling, allowing experimental and digital teams to work in tight feedback loops.

It is an environment built for speed, collaboration, and iteration—qualities that define the new generation of biotech companies translating complex data into tangible therapies.

Market and Position

The antibody therapeutics market is crowded, but Alchemab stands out by starting from an entirely different premise. While most discovery platforms look for what breaks, Alchemab looks for what protects. That inversion gives it access to biological insights that disease-centric models often miss.

Its advantage lies in how it integrates AI-guided discovery with wet-lab validation. Protective antibodies found in resilient individuals already carry a kind of clinical validation: they’ve worked in people before. By pairing those sequences with modern tools—single-cell BCR sequencing, high-throughput expression systems, and computational modeling pipelines—Alchemab can identify promising targets and optimize leads faster than traditional antibody programs.

The company’s collaborations with Eli Lilly also give it leverage that few early-stage biotechs possess: global development capabilities, manufacturing infrastructure, and regulatory expertise. Together, those strengths position Alchemab not just as a platform company, but as a potential long-term player in neurodegenerative and immune-mediated disease.

Looking Ahead

With ATLX-1282 now in Phase 1 and a robust pipeline forming behind it, Alchemab is entering a critical validation phase. Its next challenge is translating resilience biology into real therapeutic benefit—showing that the protective mechanisms observed in a few can be replicated across many.

If the data hold, the company’s approach could redefine how drug discovery begins. Instead of searching for cures in the biology of disease, researchers could start by asking how health endures. That philosophical shift could open new therapeutic categories and reshape how we think about prevention, treatment, and immune adaptation.

And even if the early programs fall short, the knowledge gained from mapping protective immune responses at population scale will continue to inform the field. For a company built around learning from the exceptional, that kind of knowledge is its own success.