Manifold Bio Partners with Roche on Brain Shuttles for Neurological Diseases

Launched in 2020 by serial biotech entrepreneur George Church and colleagues, Boston-based Manifold Bio has entered into a strategic collaboration and license agreement with Swiss pharma giant Roche. The new partnership will apply Manifold’s proprietary tissue-targeting BBB (blood-brain barrier) shuttle portfolio and AI-driven in vivo discovery engine to create multiple next-generation BBB shuttles for the treatment of neurological and neurodegenerative diseases.

Under the agreement, Manifold will lead R&D to identify and develop novel BBB shuttles tailored to select Roche therapeutic payloads. Roche will then lead preclinical, clinical, and commercialization efforts. Roche will pay Manifold an upfront fee of $55 million. In addition, Manifold is eligible to receive significant research, discovery, and preclinical milestones as well as clinical and sales milestones totaling over $2 billion, along with tiered royalties.

“Engineering molecules to safely cross the blood-brain barrier has been a grand challenge for decades, and it’s exactly the kind of problem where Manifold’s direct-to-vivo approach provides a decisive edge. We look forward to working with Roche…to bring our approach and novel shuttle technologies to expand the breadth of brain-shuttled medicines,” said Gleb Kuznetsov, Manifold Co-Founder and CEO.

Unlike traditional approaches that rely heavily on in vitro assays, Manifold’s proprietary platform can be used to measure thousands to millions of biologic variants directly in vivo, providing physiologically relevant data at unprecedented scale. This allows for rapid translation of biologics to patients, spanning antibodies, oligonucleotides, and other modalities. The company is using its platform to pursue the broad opportunity in tissue-targeted medicines, including delivery of medicines to the brain using antibody-based BBB shuttles – the focus of the Roche collaboration.

“We founded Manifold on the idea that leveraging large-scale in vivo data generation to power AI models would result in a generative drug design engine that learns directly from living systems,” said Pierce Ogden, Manifold Co-Founder and CTO. “Today we’ve built the world’s first AI system for the design of tissue-targeted biologics. With the resulting data, we are already building the world’s first virtual organism model. The collaboration with Roche validates our vision that the future of biomedicine lies in data-driven, generative design directly informed by living biology.” (Source: Manifold Bio Website, 03 November, 2025)