RyboDyn, Inc., a San Diego, CA-based biotechnology company providing an AI-powered sequencing and discovery platform, has raised $10 million in a Seed funding round. Backers were not disclosed.
The company plans to use the funds to grow its operations and further develop its products.
RyboDyn is taking a completely different approach.
For decades, nearly 98% of the human genome was considered “junk” DNA. We now know some of these regions are active, but traditional sequencing often misses them. RyboDyn has created tools to decode this hidden DNA and uncover new biology. The company is turning these discoveries into cancer targets to develop first-in-class therapies for patients with few or no treatment options.
At the center of this work is RyboCypher™, a proprietary discovery engine that combines deep sequencing of unusual RNAs with proteomic analysis to find disease-specific, druggable targets directly from patient tumors. This data feeds into CypherAtlas™, a searchable atlas that powers AI models to decode the hidden proteome at scale.
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Oncology drug development faces a dilemma. While AI and protein engineering have made designing drugs faster, the targets themselves are crowded. For example, EGFR has over 200 drugs approved or in development, and the PD-1/PD-L1 checkpoint has nearly 200 more. Today, the challenge isn’t designing molecules—it’s finding new targets. The field needs fresh biology, but traditional genomics has mostly exhausted it.
Since revealing the cryptic human proteome last year, initially in cell line models, RyboDyn has rapidly grown its CypherAtlas™ database to include around 1,000 patient tumor samples across 10 cancer types. This expansion increased the number of conserved, previously uncharacterized “dark” RNAs from hundreds of thousands to over 3 million, and the cryptic peptides they encode have grown more than 100-fold.
CypherAtlas™ now contains over 80,000 cryptic peptides confirmed by mass spectrometry, including about 15,000 cancer-specific peptides. Many of these proteins have functional domains that act as cryptic transcription factors, regulatory proteins, or new cancer drivers, often on the cell surface or secreted. These features make them prime targets for therapies, especially membrane-bound and adhesion-related proteins for immunotherapies. CypherAtlas™ is now the largest integrated dark transcriptome and proteome resource, serving as a unique engine for discovering new therapeutic targets.
Importantly, RyboDyn’s cryptic targets are completely new and uncontested. While existing oncology targets already have hundreds of drugs in development, those therapies only work for patients who express them. For example, HER2 is found in only about 15–20% of breast cancer patients, leaving most without targeted treatment options. RyboDyn’s cryptic targets go beyond these limits, offering tumor-specific therapies for a much wider range of patients.
The company has already demonstrated proof of concept in the lab, including the first-ever killing of tumor cells using an ADC targeting a cryptic protein. This milestone helped drive the current funding.
“RyboDyn is exploring one of the most underexplored areas in cancer biology,” said Eric Woersching, Managing Partner at Massive Tech Ventures, a new investor in the round. “Their ability to discover and validate targets from the dark proteome at this scale is unique. This opens a whole new way to target cancer, and RyboDyn is leading the way.”
“We set out to find the proteins that cancer hides, and now we’re uncovering them at scale,” said Imad Ajjawi, PhD, MBA, CEO and Co-founder of RyboDyn. “RyboCypher™ and CypherAtlas™ create a growing map of this hidden biology, and we’re turning these discoveries into first-in-class therapies, both in-house and with top pharma partners.”
“It’s clear that the molecules we’re identifying for the first time offer huge potential against aggressive cancers,” said Dr. Corey Dambacher, President and Co-founder. “In HER2-negative breast cancer patients, we found a new target in about 45% of tumors, including triple-negative cases with few treatment options. Our approach—combining RyboCypher™ with CypherAtlas™—lets us find entirely new, actionable targets.”
About RyboDyn, Inc.
Founded in 2022 by Imad Ajjawi, Corey Dambacher, Kerry Wilson, and Ashley Woodfin, RyboDyn is transforming disease treatment by decoding hidden cryptic proteins and using its RyboCypher™ platform to identify novel targets for first-in-class antibody therapies. Based at Lilly Gateway Labs in San Diego, with IP licensed from Oregon Health & Science University, the company partners with Moffitt Cancer Center and participates in Lilly’s AI TuneLabs and NVIDIA’s Inception Program. Backed by top investors, RyboDyn’s founders have prior successful venture-backed exits.
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