RYBODYN ANNOUNCES SEED FINANCING TO ADVANCE AI-DRIVEN DISCOVERY OF HIDDEN CANCER TARGETS

Company's CypherAtlas™ database emerges as one of oncology's largest integrated dark transcriptome and proteome resources

SAN DIEGO, March 24, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- RyboDyn, Inc., a biotechnology company decoding the dark proteome using an AI-powered novel sequencing and discovery platform, today announced the initial close of a $10M Seed financing from a syndicate of new and existing investors. The financing will accelerate the company's transition from foundational discovery into scaled platform execution and progress early-stage programs into IND-enabling studies.  

Oncology drug development is facing a paradox. While advances in AI and protein engineering are frequently touted as significantly accelerating drug design, the targets those drugs chase are more crowded than ever. For example, the well-known EGFR target has over 200 drugs approved or in development, and the PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint axis has nearly 200 more. In an era of intense focus on AI-driven drug design, the bottleneck is no longer the ability to design high-affinity molecules. It's target discovery. The field needs new biology, and conventional genomics has largely run out of it.

RyboDyn is looking somewhere else entirely.

For decades, much of the human genome, nearly 98%, was considered "junk" DNA. We now know that some of these regions are transcriptionally active, yet they remain largely invisible to conventional sequencing approaches. RyboDyn has built the tools to decipher this hidden code to reveal novel biology. The company is now translating these discoveries into actionable cancer targets to enable first-in-class therapies for patients with limited or no treatment options.

At the core is RyboCypher™, the company's proprietary discovery engine, which combines deep sequencing of non-canonical RNAs with proteomic detection to identify disease-specific, druggable targets directly from patient tumors. These data are continuously integrated into CypherAtlas™, creating a proprietary, searchable atlas that powers foundational AI models to decode the dark proteome at scale.

Since announcing the discovery of a cryptic human proteome last year, initially demonstrated as proof-of-concept in cell line models, RyboDyn has rapidly expanded its proprietary CypherAtlas™ to include data from ~1,000 patient tumor samples across 10 distinct oncology indications. This expansion has driven the discovery from hundreds of thousands to more than 3 million conserved, novel dark (previously not characterized) RNAs, while increasing the number of cryptic peptides encoded by these dark RNA species by over two orders of magnitude. Taken together, the CypherAtlas™ database now contains more than 80,000 cryptic peptides identified empirically by mass spectrometry, including ~15,000 cancer-specific peptides. Many of these proteins contain recognizable functional domains, suggesting roles as cryptic transcription factors, regulatory proteins, and novel cancer drivers that are frequently localized to the cell surface or secreted into the extracellular space. Together, these features make them especially attractive therapeutic targets, with membrane-bound and focal adhesion-associated proteins emerging as high-priority opportunities for targeted immunotherapies. CypherAtlas™ is now the largest integrated dark transcriptome and proteome resource in the field, positioning the atlas as a one-of-a-kind engine for novel target discovery.

"We set out to find the proteins that cancer hides behind, and we're now uncovering them at scale. RyboCypher™ and CypherAtlas™ provide a continuously expanding map of that hidden biology," said Imad Ajjawi, PhD, MBA, CEO and Co-founder of RyboDyn. "We're actively translating these discoveries into first-in-class therapies, both internally and with leading pharmaceutical partners."

Critically, RyboDyn's novel cryptic targets represent an entirely uncontested target landscape. While established oncology targets each have hundreds of drugs in development, the therapies are inherently limited to patients who express those targets. HER2, for example, is present in only ~15-20% of breast cancer patients, leaving the majority of breast cancer patients without access to viable targeted immunotherapies. In contrast, RyboDyn's cryptic targets expand beyond conventional target space, enabling novel, tumor-specific therapies for broader patient populations.

"It's clear that the molecules we're finding and describing for the first time represent a vast opportunity to tackle some of the most aggressive cancers," said Dr. Corey Dambacher, President and Co-founder of RyboDyn. "In a cohort of HER2-negative breast cancer patients, we identified a novel target present in approximately 45% of the tumors we analyzed. Some of these are triple-negative patients with limited treatment options. That's the value proposition of our approach; the integration of RyboCypher™ with CypherAtlas™ allows us to identify entirely new, actionable targets."

The company has already demonstrated proof-of-concept in vitro, including the first-ever ADC-mediated killing of tumor cells via a cryptic protein target—a milestone that helped catalyze the current financing. "RyboDyn is tackling one of the most underexplored frontiers in cancer biology," said Eric Woersching, Managing Partner, at Massive Tech Ventures, a new institutional investor in the round. "Their ability to systematically discover and validate targets from the dark proteome at this scale is highly differentiated. This new therapeutic landscape represents a fundamental shift in how cancer is targeted and RyboDyn is pioneering this shift."

About RyboDyn, Inc.

RyboDyn is redefining how diseases are targeted by decoding a previously hidden human proteome; cryptic proteins missed by conventional and next-generation sequencing. Powered by RyboCypher™, its proprietary sequencing and AI platform, the company uncovers and validates novel, disease-specific cryptic targets to enable first-in-class antibody therapeutics for cancer and other diseases with high unmet medical need.

With proprietary IP licensed from Oregon Health & Science University, Knight Cancer Institute, RyboDyn is advancing a differentiated "targets-to-assets" approach to therapeutic development. The company is based at Lilly Gateway Labs in San Diego and is a member of Lilly's AI TuneLabs consortium and NVIDIA's Inception Program, and has publicly disclosed a strategic collaboration with Moffitt Cancer Center.

RyboDyn is backed by leading global investors, including Genedant, SeaX Ventures, SOSV, Swell VC, Massive Tech Ventures, and P2V. The company was founded by serial entrepreneurs with prior venture-backed exits, including leadership roles in companies that achieved multi-billion-dollar public offerings and acquisitions.

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