Score will leverage Asimov’s CHO Edge system to accelerate the development of enhanced cancer immunotherapies with improved ADCC activity
BOSTON, MA, March 17, 2026–Asimov, the synthetic biology company advancing the design and manufacture of therapeutics, today announced a cell line development partnership with Score Pharma, Inc., a biopharmaceutical company developing next-generation antibody therapeutics with enhanced anti-cancer activity. The first phase of the collaboration centers on Score Pharma’s lead program, a biosuperior anti-HER2 trastuzumab for the treatment of breast cancer.
Score Pharma has developed an innovative process technology that affects core fucosylation during antibody production. By reducing core fucose attached to therapeutic antibodies, Score aims to significantly increase Antibody-Dependent Cellular Cytotoxicity (ADCC), a key immune mechanism by which therapeutic antibodies eliminate cancer cells. Score Pharma's technology can enhance the binding of natural killer cells to antibody-cancer cell complexes, potentially improving the efficacy of existing antibody therapeutics.
Through the collaboration, Score will leverage Asimov’s CHO Edge system - which uses a GS knock-out CHO host, a hyperactive transposase, a library of characterized genetic elements, and Kernel, Asimov's computer-aided genetic design software - as the foundation for its proof-of-concept studies.
"Biosuperior antibodies represent one of the most compelling opportunities in oncology today,” said Alec Nielsen, co-founder and CEO at Asimov. “Approved antibodies can be modified to further enhance their therapeutic benefit, and Score Pharma's approach to modulating core fucosylation is a clever way to unlock that potential. We're proud that CHO Edge is the platform enabling their first clinical program."
“Our potential to significantly improve established antibody therapeutics is second only to our passion for improving human health and is limited only by access to relevant cell lines. The Asimov partnership makes our first clinically viable target possible,” said Bruce Edward Jones, Ph.D., Founder and CEO at Score Pharma.
About Asimov
Asimov’s mission is to advance humanity’s ability to design living systems, enabling biotechnologies with outsized societal benefit. The company is developing a synthetic biology platform – from cells to software – to design and manufacture next-generation therapeutics, including biologics, cell/gene therapies, and RNA through a combination of products, services, and collaborations.
Founded by bioengineers from MIT and Boston University and headquartered in Boston, the company has raised over $200 million from top institutional investors including Andreessen Horowitz, CPP Investments, Horizons Ventures, and Fidelity Management & Research Company. For more information, visit www.asimov.com.
About Score Pharma
Score Pharma Inc. is dedicated to developing new, more potent antibody therapeutics by transforming existing, clinically proven antibody therapeutics to improve patient response. Through a science driven strategy and disciplined execution, the company aims to deliver transformative outcomes for patients and sustainable returns for shareholders. For more information, visit www.scorepharma.com.
Highlights
Virtual Private Network (VPN): Users connect to the cluster, provide some credentials and are then able to access internal tools.
Single Sign-On: A tool like Kerberos allows you to use the same account across various components.
Home-grown user accounts: You implement an authentication system and users have a separate username/password for your computing infrastructure.
Asimov, the synthetic biology company building a full-stack platform to program living cells, announced today it has been awarded a contract as part of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) Automating Scientific Knowledge Extraction (ASKE) opportunity.
Through ASKE, Asimov will work to develop a physics-based artificial intelligence (AI) design engine for biology. The goal of the initiative is to improve the reliability of programming complex cellular behaviors.
“To achieve truly predictive engineering of biology, we require dramatic advances in computer-aided design. Machine learning will be critical to bridge genome-scale experimental data with computational models that accurately capture the underlying biophysics. As genetically engineered systems grow in complexity, they become difficult for humans to design and understand. For simple genetic systems with only a couple of genes, synthetic biologists typically use high-throughput screening and basic optimization algorithms. But to engineer more complex applications in health, materials, and manufacturing, we need radically new algorithms to intelligently design the DNA and simulate cell behavior.”
Alec Nielsen, Phd, Asimov CEO
Over the past 50 years, DARPA has been a world leader in spurring innovation across the field of AI, including statistical-learning and rule-based approaches. We are proud to work with DARPA to advance the state-of-the-art in AI-assisted genetic engineering.
Asimov’s founders previously built a hybrid genetic engineering and computer-aided design platform called Cello to program logic circuit behaviors in cells. The ASKE opportunity will seek to support an ambitious expansion in the types of biological behaviors that can be engineered. Asimov’s approach will leverage “multi-omics” cellular measurements, structured biological metadata, and novel AI architectures that combine deep learning, reinforcement learning, and mechanistic modeling. Over the past year, the company has ramped up hiring in experimental synthetic biology, machine learning, and data science to accelerate development of their genetic design platform.
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Headering 3
DARPA recently announced a multi-year investment of $2B into innovative artificial intelligence research called the AI Next campaign. A part of this wide-ranging AI strategy is DARPA’s Artificial Intelligence Exploration program, which was developed to help expeditiously move pioneering AI research from idea to exploration in fewer than 90 days. DARPA’s ASKE opportunity is part of this program and is focused on developing AI technologies that can reason over rich models of complex systems.
“Over the past 50 years, DARPA has been a world leader in spurring innovation across the field of AI, including statistical-learning and rule-based approaches. We are proud to work with DARPA to advance the state-of-the-art in AI-assisted genetic engineering.”
Alec Nielsen, PhD, Asimov CEO
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