Organization Description
Antoxerene, Inc., a portfolio company of Ichor Therapeutics, Inc., is a pharmaceutical company that uses proprietary RecombiPure protein synthesis technology to enable next-generation screening of small molecule drugs to target protein-protein interactions relevant to the biology of aging.
As of August 2025, Antoxerene is no longer prominent on the Ichor website, and its own website is moribund; we judge it likely that this unit is no longer active.
At the cellular level, communication within the body occurs through protein interactions. These communication pathways can be enhanced or inhibited using small molecule compounds, which serve as the active ingredient of many disease-treating drugs. Drug screening is commonly performed in the life sciences to identify leads for drug development. However, several biologic pathways of known importance to aging are unable to be screened effectively because proteins necessary for the screen cannot be manufactured at sufficient purity and scale.
Antoxerene uses proprietary RecombiPure expression technology to generate proteins that cannot be manufactured at scale using traditional approaches, enabling screening on many previously “undruggable” targets. The Antoxerene team has successfully found small molecule hits on several difficult or new pathways.
In August 2017, Antoxerene announced that they had closed an oversubscribed $1.5M seed round involving Kizoo Technology Capital, Lifespan Research Institute, (then SENS Research Foundation), and private investors participated in the round.
Under a co-development deal with Finger Lakes Bio, Antoxerene used RecombiPure to develop screens for the p53/MDM2 pathway, a major oncology target, and the p53/FOXO4 pathway, a newly identified pathway involved in the survival of senescent cells, among others. Antoxerene subsequently entered into a joint venture with Juvenescence called FoxBio to develop senolytic drugs based on the latter interaction, securing $10M in the process from Kizoo Technology Ventures and other investors.