Lila Biologics co-founders CEO Jake Kraft, left, and Chief Scientist Anindya Roy. (Lila Photo)
Lila Bio , a startup spun out of Nobel laureate David Baker’s lab at the University of Washington, has received a $3.65 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to develop a treatment for pulmonary hypertension.
The condition causes high blood pressure in the arteries that carry blood from the heart to the lungs. It forces the heart to work harder and can lead to heart failure.
The Small Business Innovation Research fast-track award supports Lila’s efforts to develop a protein-based treatment for pulmonary hypertension that could be given by injection a few times a year.
“Most approved therapies only manage symptoms, such as vasodilators,” Lila CEO Jake Kraft said in a LinkedIn post , referring to drugs that widen blood vessels. “Lila Bio is pursuing clinically-validated, disease-modifying mechanisms that treat the underlying disease.”
The funding comes from the NIH’s National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute and is divided into two phases. The initial $605,981 will support early testing in mice, rats and non-human primates. The second phase, totaling $3,049,462, will support further animal testing and studies using lung tissue from patients.
Kraft and chief scientist Anindya Roy co-founded Lila in 2023. Both worked as postdoctoral fellows at UW’s Institute for Protein Design, which Baker directs. Lila raised $10 million in seed funding the year it was founded. Last year, it announced a collaboration with pharmaceutical giant Eli Lilly to develop treatments for solid tumors.
The startup uses AI and machine learning to design therapeutic proteins through two platforms. One supports the pulmonary hypertension project, creating long-acting injectable drugs designed to remain active in the body for weeks or months. The other focuses on targeted radiotherapy, using proteins to deliver radioactive isotopes to tumors.
“We want to bring medicines to patients,” Kraft told GeekWire in an earlier interview . “We don’t want to just say we’ve designed a protein, but we actually want to be able to say we’ve saved lives.”
