Nautilus Biotechnology Announces Participation In SEEDS Research Consortium, Which Was Awarded Up To $51.7M By The Advanced Research Projects Agency For Health

Nautilus Biotechnology, Inc. (NASDAQ:NAUT), a company pioneering intact, single-molecule proteomics approaches, today announced its participation in SEEDS (Sequence-to-disease: Environment-aware Ensembles of Disordered proteins at Scale), a four-year, multi-center research consortium awarded up to $51.7 million by the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H). The consortium, which is co-led by the Buck Institute for Research on Aging and Georgetown University, aims to predict how disease-causing proteins misfold before irreversible damage occurs, and to use those predictions to develop new ways of detecting, slowing, and treating neurodegenerative diseases and cancer. Nautilus expects to receive up to $6 million over the duration of the program to deploy its Voyager Platform to measure proteoforms – the distinct versions of proteins that drive function – from model systems, disease tissues, and biofluids, starting with Alzheimer’s disease and Ewing sarcoma.

The genesis of pathologies such as Alzheimer’s disease and cancer often lies in protein dysregulation, misfolding, and aggregation. SEEDS seeks to understand and predict the behavior of intrinsically disordered proteins implicated in these diseases. As many as half of human proteins may have intrinsically disordered regions whose shapes are constantly shifting. Because they lack the stable shapes and binding pockets that most drugs are designed to fit, they have been hard to study and have long been considered "undruggable." Some of these protein shapes are prone to aggregation, leading to irreversible damage. Today, most treatments arrive only after that point, making earlier detection and intervention essential. SEEDS aims to address this challenge by developing diagnostics and therapeutics that enable earlier intervention. SEEDS is part of ARPA-H’s BIOmolecular Grammar for protein Aggregation Modulation and Intervention (BIOGAMI) program, which focuses on the earliest stages of protein dysfunction, and is led by ARPA-H Program Manager Shannon Greene, Ph.D.

Within SEEDS, the Nautilus work under the program will support the study of proteoforms of tau and EWS::FLI1, proteins implicated in Alzheimer’s disease and Ewing sarcoma, respectively, and is anticipated to extend to a larger set of intrinsically disordered proteins. The Voyager Platform is designed to analyze millions to billions of intact proteins independently and simultaneously at massive scale to quantify the complex dynamics of the proteoform landscape across disease processes. The large data corpus generated from these studies is expected to be used to train AI models to predict how proteoforms push a protein toward aggregation. SEEDS researchers may be able to use those predictions to design new diagnostics and therapeutics.

Nautilus’ participation in SEEDS builds on work already underway:

A Voyager Platform field-evaluation unit at the Buck Institute for Research on Aging generating tau proteoform data since early 2025.
Initiation of the Iterative Mapping Early Access Program earlier this year to enable broader access to Iterative Mapping of proteoforms ahead of the planned Voyager Platform shipment in mid-2027.
Recent validation of the proprietary Iterative Mapping method in a peer-reviewed Nature Methods publication.
A collaboration with the Michael J. Fox Foundation and Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar, supported by a foundation research grant, to develop a proteoform assay for alpha-synuclein, the protein implicated in Parkinson’s disease.
SEEDS is the first application of Iterative Mapping to a pediatric cancer, Ewing sarcoma, and Nautilus plans to add proteoform assays on a continuing basis, with approximately 20 expected by mid-2028.