On the evening of February 26th, during the Fireside Chat, Shirley Liu, the Founder and CEO of GV20 Therapeutics, shared that her company just completed a financing round last week, led by a family office with an investment of over ten million USD. Last year’s award-winning projects have gained a new member, bringing the known successful fundraising cases to three: GV20 Therapeutics, Rapafusyn Pharmaceuticals, and Agilis Robotics.
GV20 is the world’s first biotech company to use AI to identify new targets and design antibody drugs that have successfully entered clinical trials. The founder, formerly a renowned professor at Harvard and the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, is an outstanding female entrepreneur.
Congratulations to GV20 and Dr. Liu!
Dr. X. Shirley Liu is the co-founder and CEO of GV20 Therapeutics, a clinical-stage AI-based next generation biotherapeutics company. GV20’s lead program GV20-0251, a monoclonal antibody against a novel immune checkpoint IGSF8, is the world’s first AI-designed antibody against an AI-predicted target in the clinic. The power of GV20’s AI platform is demonstrated by GV20-0251’s unprecedented 3-year timeline from target research to IND, and validated by GV20-0251’s favorable safety and promising monotherapy efficacy in advanced metastatic cancer patients. Dr. Liu received her PhD in Biomedical Informatics and PhD minor in Computer Science from Stanford University in 2002. Before joining GV20, she was a Professor of Biostatistics and Computational Biology at the Department of Data Science at Dana-Farber Cancer Institute (DFCI) and Harvard University. She has published over 270 papers and has an H-index of 124. She is a fellow of the International Society of Computational Biology (ISCB), American Institute for Medical and Biological Engineering (AIMBE) and was a Breast Cancer Research Foundation Investigator (2017-2021). She is a recipient of the Sloan Research Fellowship (2008), Weitzman Outstanding Early Career Investigator Award from the Endocrine Society (2016), ISCB Innovator Award (2020), and the Benjamin Franklin Award for Open Access in the Life Sciences (2020). Her lab has mentored 28 PhD and postdoctoral trainees to independent academic careers.
GV20 Therapeutics: AI-driven Next-generation Cancer Biotherapeutics
GV20 Therapeutics is a clinical-stage biotechnology company pioneering the integration of artificial intelligence (AI), genomics, and cancer immunology to develop novel cancer biotherapeutics. Their proprietary platform harnesses AI to decode patients’ natural B cell responses from large cohorts of tumor profiles, enabling simultaneous discovery of novel targets and therapeutic antibodies. GV20’s discovery pipeline spans best-in-class and first-in-class monoclonal and bispecific antibodies, as well as antibody-drug conjugates (ADCs), reflecting their comprehensive approach to innovative cancer therapy.
The company’s lead program, GV20-0251, exemplifies their groundbreaking approach: an AI-designed, first-in-class, fully human, Fc-attenuated IgG1 monoclonal antibody targeting the novel immune checkpoint IGSF8. Preclinical studies demonstrated that GV20-0251 inhibits tumor growth through enhancing natural killer (NK) cell cytotoxicity, boosting dendritic cell-mediated antigen cross-priming, and activating T cells, both as a monotherapy and in combination with anti-PD1. In a U.S. multi-center Phase 1 clinical trial (NCT05669430) with advanced solid tumor patients, GV20-0251 has shown favorable safety profiles and promising monotherapy efficacy, particularly in cutaneous melanoma patients with primary resistance to anti-PD1. Setting a new standard in drug development speed, GV20-0251 progressed from target discovery to IND in just three years. As the first AI-designed antibody drug against an AI-predicted target to reach the clinic, it represents a paradigm shift in cancer drug development and demonstrates AI’s potential to unlock critical insights from patient profiles, potentially transforming outcomes for cancer patients.
