Q&A with Errik Anderson, Alloy Therapeutics Founder and CEO

Errik Anderson

More than ever, the Pharma industry relies on solid and reliable data in order to develop new treatments. Alloy Therapeutics CEO Errik Anderson speaks with Pharm Exec about new technologies and platforms to help with this.

Pharm Exec: What successes have you achieved by using the “may the best drug win” approach?

Anderson: We believe the best scientific insights should dictate which drugs advance to the clinic, rather than whether someone can afford access to the right enabling technologies. Since Alloy’s founding in 2017, we have been a company focused on democratizing access to tools, technologies, services, and company creation capabilities for the global scientific community. Having launched our first commercial platform in 2019, we’ve grown our ecosystem to 130+ partners across academia, biotech, and pharma, and have achieved our first IND filing from a licensee of our first platform, the ATX-Gx for human antibody discovery, and continue to see more partners advancing to the clinic. We have rapidly expanded ATX-Gx with new strains designed to solve different problems in antibody discovery, all of which are accessible to our partners under their original license. We have expanded this model of democratizing access from antibodies into five adjacent biologic modalities: TCRs, genetic medicines, cell therapies, peptides, and drug delivery technology.

Pharm Exec: How has your scientific pedigree and knowledge helped you to integrate platform technologies and services?

Anderson: Alloy reinvests 100% of our revenues into scientific innovation and ensures that it is accessible to our partners. The close integration of our platforms and services is driven by the philosophy that the most transformative medicine comes from breakthroughs in enabling technology. By focusing on enabling technology, Alloy has reduced barriers to allow the best ideas to advance quickly. We offer bespoke drug discovery campaigns to our partners to maximize the value of these technologies and others, to expand their capacity and expertise to find the best therapeutic drug candidates. With the help of our venture studios, 82VS, we’re also able to continuously support the launch of new asset-focused startups that in turn leverage our platforms and services. These new startups also serve as early adopters of our innovations and help expand our technology and service offering for our entire ecosystem.

Pharm Exec: How has the industry reacted to the cross-industry collaboration you’ve set the stage for?

Anderson: Alloy’s novel business model has been embraced by 16 established pharmaceutical companies, all of whom understand and share our commitment to developing and supporting long-sustaining research and development. The very nature of Alloy’s biotech ecosystem is driven by our integrated scientific activities, with each component working in synergy to create as many new medicines as possible. Our democratized approach to drug discovery and cross-industry collaboration gives us—and our partners—access to an incredible pool of talent much more efficiently and cost-effectively than could be built in-house by a single company. What is paramount to us throughout the drug discovery process is enabling these capabilities throughout this ecosystem, including our industry and academic partners, without restrictions. Our partners come to us with challenges in the drug discovery process, and we collaborate closely with them to develop new technologies and workflows that can benefit the industry at large.

Pharm Exec: What are the biggest challenges you’ve faced while attempting to democratize drug discovery technology?

Anderson: Accessibility to our technology is the most important component of our business. We make certain that our diverse collection of drug discovery platforms remains constantly accessible throughout the ecosystem with generous terms, so our partners can focus on creating transformative medicines. Often teams don’t necessarily have the capacity in house to leverage these platforms or face intractable challenges in their drug discovery efforts, so we support them with tailored drug discovery campaigns. This allows our team to become experts in using our proprietary in vivo, in vitro, and in silico technology, as well as incorporate other top industry standard protocols to discover the best therapeutic drug candidates for our partners. To further support the industry as an innovation partner, earlier this year we launched an Innovation Subscription program, which offers access to all current and future Alloy discovery technologies at one fixed annual fee. This offering has a multiplier effect given our commitment to reinvesting 100% of our revenues into innovation: each Innovation Subscription fee is invested into acquiring and inventing new technology that can benefit the entire consortium.

Pharm Exec: How important is collaboration amongst partners?

Anderson: At Alloy, collaboration is at the very foundation of everything we do—it’s in our name. We make medicine with others. We believe we can find a way to collaborate with everyone, even those who look like competitors on the surface. When Alloy was first created, our goal was to have a company “made for scientists, by scientists,” operating under the unique mission of reducing barriers and increasing access to platform technologies and services for emerging companies. In collaboration with our partners, we continue to focus on creating long-lasting partnerships and not just the near-term success, and we intend for our partners to come back to us time and again for help with their discovery needs. Having partnered with the top scientific and business minds/companies in the industry including founders, entrepreneurs- and executives-in-residence, and biotech and pharma partners, we have created an ecosystem where barriers to innovation are eliminated so that scientific ideas turn into novel therapies that reach patients faster.