Rayca Precision, Data Powered Therapeutics team up on AI-designed nanobody cancer drugs

Rayca Precision and Data Powered Therapeutics on June 29 announced a co-development partnership to build nanobody therapeutics for hard-to-treat cancers. The deal links AI-driven molecular design with automated protein testing to speed candidate selection and reduce late-stage development failures.

Why it matters: - The partnership aims to move nanobody cancer drugs faster toward the clinic by filtering out candidates with poor developability earlier in the process. - The companies are targeting cancers with high unmet need, including treatment-resistant tumors and aggressive neuroendocrine cancers. - The collaboration is designed to shorten work that can take more than a year of sequential bench testing into automated runs that return decision-grade data in weeks.

What happened: - Rayca Precision and Data Powered Therapeutics GmbH announced a strategic co-development partnership on June 29, 2026, in London. - The companies will jointly design and advance a new generation of nanobody therapeutics for oncology. - Rayca brings an AI discovery engine that models therapeutic targets in motion, designs molecules with structure-aware generative methods and screens candidates with free-energy methods before synthesis. - Data Powered Therapeutics brings an automated protein-engineering platform that expresses, purifies and characterises nanobody panels at scale.

The details: - The platform can test up to 1,000 nanobody variants in parallel in a single automated run. - The experimental system measures binding, stability, solubility, specificity and expression. - The collaboration links computational design with high-throughput validation in a tight feedback loop. - Results from Data Powered Therapeutics' testing will feed back into Rayca's engine to improve the next round of design. - The programme covers several oncology mechanisms, including targeted protein degradation through a nanobody bioPROTAC approach. - Additional mechanisms are advancing under the agreement, and several are described as having first-in-class potential. - Specific targets were not disclosed. - The effort includes disease settings such as cancers resistant to standard therapy, tumours that evade the immune system and small cell lung cancer, including disease that has spread to the brain. - Nanobodies are central to the programme because their stability, tissue penetration and engineering flexibility make them suitable for difficult targets and complex modalities.

Between the lines: - The deal reflects a broader industry shift toward designing for developability at the start, rather than discovering problems after expensive testing. - Rayca is trying to use accumulated programme data as a reusable learning system, not just a one-off design tool. - Data Powered Therapeutics is positioning automated wet-lab generation as the bottleneck-breaker in drug discovery, not compute alone. - The combination is meant to concentrate resources on molecules with the clearest path to the clinic.

What's next: - The companies plan to advance lead programmes toward development candidates. - The portfolio is expected to expand over time under the agreement. - More detail on specific targets may emerge later, but the companies said those targets remain confidential for now.

The bottom line: - Rayca and Data Powered Therapeutics are betting that AI design plus large-scale automated protein testing can make nanobody cancer drug discovery faster, cheaper and less failure-prone.