Ukko, a biotech company striving to eliminate food allergies and sensitivities, announced Wednesday that it has secured a $40 million Series B funding led by Leaps by Bayer as it strives to rid the world of the prevalent food allergies and sensitivities, including peanuts and gluten.
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Hundreds of millions of people around the world suffer from food allergies and experts predict the numbers will continue to climb in the coming years.
Food allergies and sensitivities cost more than $25 billion every year in the US alone and place enormous strain on families, communities, the healthcare system, as well as the ag and the agriculture and food industries.
Ukko harnesses artificial intelligence and protein engineering to develop healthier food and therapies for food allergies. The new funding will allow Ukko to enter clinical trials with its investigational therapeutic for peanut allergies, and will also accelerate the development of its gluten molecules, designed for people with celiac and other gluten sensitivities.
Co-founded by CEO Anat Binur and Chairman Yanay Ofran, Ukko is backed by some of the world's top investors in the fields of food, pharma, agriculture, and technology. The company's Advisory Board includes renowned allergy researchers and physicians, as well as executives and policymakers from the food and agriculture industries.
The outstanding funding round was led by Leaps by Bayer – the impact investment arm of the German pharmaceutical giant and was joined by Continental Grain Company, Skyviews Life Science, PeakBridge Ventures, Fall Line Capital, as well as existing investors Khosla Ventures, Innovation Endeavors, and TIME Ventures, the investment fund of Marc Benioff.
Bayer is a global enterprise with core competencies in the life science fields of health care and nutrition. The company, whose mission statement is "Health for All, Hunger for None," is committed to the principles of sustainable development. As such, Leaps by Bayer leads impact investments into solutions to some of today's biggest challenges in health and agriculture. The investment portfolio of Leaps by Bayer includes mover 30 companies and lists several Israeli ones.
Ukko's novel approach to food sensitivities uses a proprietary AI-powered platform that precisely engineers food proteins to eliminate their allergenicity while keeping their good biochemical and nutritional characteristics.
The platform uses patient samples, computational biology, immunology, and protein engineering to make proteins that do not trigger the immune system.
"We are at a unique crossroads in the history of science," Ofran said. "Big data allows us to understand the underpinnings of food sensitivities. Computational tools allow us to precisely design the proteins that make up our bodies and our food. New genome editing technologies allow us to rewrite DNA to produce these new proteins in living cells. Ukko sits at the intersection of these breakthrough technologies, allowing us to redefine healthy food at the molecular level, based on real data."
Ukko has already built one of the largest clinically validated molecular maps of food allergies, which unlocks critical data and allows the company a rich foundation for further innovation. Ukko has also generated promising data, based on patient samples, that suggests the company's investigational peanut and gluten proteins do not trigger allergic reactions responses in the immune system of patients.
"We are at the forefront of a revolution. Pharma and the food industry will redefine how they think about their products and missions," said Binur. "Hundreds of millions of people around the world suffer from food allergies and experts see it as a global epidemic. Ending food allergies is critical and is only the beginning. Ukko's tech has the potential to leverage science and human data to redesign our food and medicine."
Speaking with Israel Hayom, Managing Director of Bayer Israel Hugo Hagen said the company is likely to invest in Israeli firms in the future, as well.
"Bayer is always looking for investment opportunities to fuel our business and Israel is a great place to look. There is so much outstanding innovation taking place here, and Bayer's recent investments here show we have Israel on our minds.
"Look at Bayer's collaboration with Tel Aviv University's Prof. Tal Dvir, to speed up drug validation by testing new drugs on 3D-printed heart tissue; Leaps by Bayer invested in FutuRx, a leading Israeli biotechnology incubator focused on innovative therapeutic technologies.
"In agriculture innovation, Bayer partners with Prospera Technologies to develop integrated digital solutions for vegetable greenhouse growers, and The Bayer Trendlines Ag Innovation Fund, set up in 2016, established EcoPhage in 2019, a new company focused on discovering and developing environmentally friendly products for disease control in agriculture. I would not be surprised if Bayer made additional investments in Israel.
Many, however, would argue that while very important, the world is facing more pressing problems than food sensitivities. Hagen, however, contends that investments in companies like Ukko, which engineer solutions like gluten-free proteins, plays perfectly into Bayer's mission statement.
"The Investment by Leaps in Ukko, which mission is to eliminate food allergies and sensitivities, is an excellent example of investing in companies who contributes to our mission statement.
"Food sensitivities and allergies can be a health issue and a hunger issue particularly in countries outside the 'first world,' where access to gluten-free or low-allergenic food is often expensive and sometimes unavailable. While bread/wheat flour are a basic nutrient in many parts of the world such as India, Russia, China, Pakistan, Egypt, and most of the world actually, and peanuts are a basic food staple consumed in China, India, Nigeria, the US, Indonesia, Vietnam, Brazil – a solution for sensitivities is not a luxury but a necessity.
"From this perspective engineering proteins that do not trigger the immune system serves both health for all and hunger for none."
Hagen moved to Israel about two years ago, when he was named head of Bayer's local operations. The experience so far, he said, has been wonderful.
"Welcome to Israel Hugo, what can I do for you?" It was a call from a representative from the innovation ecosystem, and I believe that call sums up my experience so far.
"Everywhere I go, regardless if it's the authorities, academia, private companies, hospitals, or organizations, I've been met with nothing but positivity and interest in finding ways of collaborating. Let's call that approach 'a culture of collaboration and innovation.' This is a culture put into system which I believe is rather unique and something Israel can be very proud of," he said.
Touching on the way Israel has been handling the coronavirus crisis, Hagen said, "It's always easier to look at things in the rearview mirror and come up with the right answers and I'm sure if we could go back in time, Israel and other countries would have done some things differently."
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"What we have to remember is that the COVID crisis did not come with a blueprint set of solutions on how to solve the problem, and Israel like many other countries had to find their own way of how to handle the situation.
"At the end of the day, the most important thing we do is to learn from what we have done and make sure we do the right thing going forward. Ensuring access to vaccines to everyone is by far the most important thing we can do at this point and here Israel has done an outstanding job."
