Goldman Sachs 47th Annual Global Healthcare Conference 2026

Jun 9, 2026

Slides

Summary

Generative AI platforms have enabled rapid, cost-effective drug discovery, with ABS-201 advancing in phase II trials for androgenic alopecia and endometriosis. Preclinical and early clinical data show promising regenerative effects, targeting large unmet needs in hair loss and women's health.

Great. I'm Sean McClain, Founder and CEO of Absci. We're a generative AI drug creation company. When I founded the company 15 years ago, originally, we were not focused on AI drug discovery. We were focused on how we can scale technology to look at protein-protein interactions. We were an early adopter of generative AI in 2018, looking at how we could take this protein-protein interaction data with these transformers and really be able to go after hard to drug targets and start to engineer biology to be able to go after hard targets like GPCRs, ion channels. We're at an exciting inflection point now in the history of Absci, where we're actually starting to see the drugs that we've designed with our AI go into the clinic. Within the next 24 months, we'll have two phase II clinical readouts from ABS-201 for androgenic alopecia as well as endometriosis. I think it's a very differentiated pipeline that we're building out with the prolactin receptor biology. When we think about drug discovery and utilizing AI, we think about it in the sense of being able to industrialize it, being able to get more shots on goal. I think if you look at what we've been able to do to date, being able to get drugs into the clinic for roughly $10 million-$15 million of investment, when traditionally that takes $50+ million. It's really exciting to be able to see that you can start to fail fast with these investments. You start to look at China along with agentic AI and these foundation models that are being built. You can start to see where you can very rapidly get to go from target to a phase II proof of concept readout in a very short amount of time with very low cost. That's a future that we see and that we're looking to build. As I mentioned, we've used our pipeline and technology to build a very differentiated asset, ABS-201, targeting the prolactin receptor for androgenic alopecia and endometriosis, which I'll talk more about. As I mentioned, we're using AI to really be able to design the antibodies to have the properties that we want, be able to go after these hard to drug targets. Ion channels, GPCRs have been notoriously hard to drug. One of our partnerships with Omron, we've shown that we can go after an ion channel that had been known for the past 20 years. No one had been able to actually drug this particular ion channel, and we're able to use our Origin two pipeline and technology to actually drug that ion channel, opening up new opportunities within that particular indication. We came out with an exciting update to our AI platform, an exciting foundation model, Origin-1, where we're able to show that we could go after what we call zero-shot epitopes. Epitopes that have no structural information known to them, so there's no antibody complex to that particular target of interest. Really being able to show that we can go after new novel targets and new novel epitopes. We're the first group, to our knowledge, to be able to show this. We recently came out with an updated manuscript on this, and we're excited to again, be utilizing this to create differentiated assets. In addition to partnerships that we've had in the past with pharma companies like Merck and AstraZeneca, I mentioned Omron. We're also building out our own internal pipeline, and we have ABS-201 that is in a phase II clinical study right now for androgenic alopecia and the endometriosis study on this program will start at the end of the year. Additionally, we do have exciting new early-stage assets that are in development that I would say complement the prolactin receptor pathway and kind of this DTC market that's emerging within these two indications. ABS-201, this is an exciting new opportunity in the first indication, which is androgenic alopecia. Think hair regrowth. This is pattern baldness that you see in both male and females, and it affects 80 million Americans alone. This is a huge unmet medical need. There hasn't been a lot of innovation within the space for the last 20-30 years. The same two targets are continuously hit, the androgen receptor and finasteride, and then you have minoxidil. Again, these are not giving the patients the durability that they're looking for, as well as efficacy, and I think that there's a lot of white space to improve on within this category. What is prolactin doing in the hair follicle and in hair regrowth and just hair biology in general? What we've been able to find is that prolactin, stress, inflammatory, access, and from data that we've been able to generate and what's out in the literature, is that it is driving this inflammatory process and fibrotic damage within the scalp, and it's driving the hair follicle into the catagen state, and ultimately driving the miniaturization of the follicle. What we're seeing is that if you block this receptor, you're able to reverse the miniaturization and rebuild the stem cell niche, which I'll talk about later in these upcoming slides. How does ABS-201 compare to standard of care? We looked at a hair regrowth model in mice. This is a shaving study. What we were able to show when comparing ABS-201 to topical minoxidil 5%, we were able to show superior hair regrowth and efficacy when compared to oral minoxidil. What got us really excited about this particular mechanism in the first place was the work that Andreas Busch did, our former Chief Innovation Officer, while he was at Bayer. What you see in the data up here are stump-tailed macaques. These are a population of monkeys that naturally go bald, and you're looking at the tops of their head. They were treated for 28 weeks with a anti-prolactin receptor antibody. You can see that by 6 months they get their pigmentation back. You see they go from gray to their jet black hair. That was pretty remarkable to get pigmentation back, regrowth. What was even more remarkable here was post-treatment for four years, they continued to regrow their hair. This is a true regenerative effect. Essentially, the body was able to heal itself and to regenerate the necessary machinery for that follicle to continue to grow. We have a hypothesis as to why this is, and it all comes back to the stem cell. We were able to elucidate some of this mechanism through a hair regrowth study that we did with Professor Ralf Paus at the University of Miami, a leading hair expert who developed this ex vivo model where we were able to take scalp biopsies of individuals, in this case, males, and really be able to start to understand the mechanism of prolactin and what's going on. This was a 72-day culture, and we compared the ABS-201 compared to prolactin. You can see here from the microscopic hair cycling imaging that ABS-201 is able to drive the follicle into the anagen state, and prolactin drives it into the catagen. We have the full data set from this collaboration that we did at our KOL Day in December. It is online if you'd like to see it. I will just highlight one piece here before moving on to some new exciting data that we are going to announce today. This is on the stem cells. So what you see here is ABS-201 is able to increase the number of K15 stem cells in the niche. What you see on the bottom left-hand chart is that prolactin drives the apoptosis of the K15 stem cells. This is really important because what you see over time is the stem cell population being depleted in those balding regions. Being able to replenish the stem cells is very key to being able to get that durable effect that you saw in the stump-tailed macaques. Another piece of information, which we'll be sharing more later on, is it does look like prolactin does increase Collagen 17A1, which actually anchors the stem cell to the bulge into the niche. What you see with a lot of the literature that's out there is that the Collagen 17A1 decreases over time. Seeing prolactin or seeing ABS-201 increase the Collagen 17A1, in addition to the stem cells, is very encouraging and again, what we believe is giving us that durability. One of the new pieces of data that we're presenting today is on the female. We've presented data to date on males. One piece that we've been asked by investors recently is, how does this work in females? We had strong confidence that this would work in females. You see it in female mice, you see it in the female stump-tailed macaques. We wanted to take a look at the scalp biopsies in female, and these are premenopausal females. We have post-menopausal females as well that is ongoing. We'll share that data once it's available. What you see is a very similar effect in males that you do in males. As you block the receptor with ABS-201, you see an increase in the anagen phase. When you add prolactin, you see it driving it into the catagen phase. Again, this lines up very nicely with what we are seeing in the stump-tailed macaques, as well as the mice and what we saw in males. We are excited to be sharing this with you all today. Just around this study out, in addition to the stem cells, what we additionally saw from this study was two key growth factors increased, FGF 7, IGF 1. These are important for driving the follicle into the anagen state. We also see proliferation of the hair matrix with the keratinocytes. We also see a decrease in TGF-beta, again, when you're blocking the prolactin receptor. All of these are critically important for ensuring that all the necessary machinery is there to reverse the miniaturization and regrow the terminal hair follicle. We're really excited to be driving this program forward. A quick update on the clinical study. We have completed the single ascending dose. Within a very short amount of time, we will be releasing the SAD, safety tolerability and PK data. Please be on the lookout for that. We're very excited to be announcing that and sharing that data with you. Additionally, the MAD portion of the study has started, and this is with healthy individuals that do have AGA. We'll have a 13-week interim readout on that later this year with the 26 efficacy readout, first part of 27. Everything is progressing as planned and very excited for these upcoming readouts. Here in June in just a very short amount of time, we're going to have that SAD data out. We took the TPP that we got feedback from dermatologists and being able to achieve roughly what oral minoxidil is able to achieve. We see this being a very large market opportunity. We took this into a consumer quant study. Assuming that you could have roughly oral minoxidil levels along with durability of 2 to 3 years, we estimate the market opportunity for this within the U.S. alone is $25 billion, and globally, it's a $40 billion market. We see this playing really nicely into this total vitality market that we're seeing evolve, where patients not only want weight, they want their hair, they want to feel better, they want to look better, and we think that this fits really nicely into that and excited again for the upcoming data later this year. Now moving on to endometriosis. Same drug, same target, different indication, very similar to AGA. This is a large market opportunity. The standard of care is really poor. The need for therapy here is extremely high. One in 10 women have endometriosis. It's a very debilitating disease, and prolactin, and being able to shut that pathway off has the opportunity to actually be potentially disease-modifying, where you're able to reduce overall lesion pain, as well as decrease the lesion size as well. As I mentioned, prolactin does seem to be driving the lesion formation as well as the pain sensitization. Here's some preclinical data. Data on the left-hand side shows how prolactin does drive lesion formation, and we have data on the right-hand side looking at overall pain. You do see that by blocking the prolactin receptor in mice, you do see an overall reduction in overall pain, seen by how far these mice can walk. We've also done some recent studies showing how prolactin drives pain sensitization as well. You have the opportunity to reduce, again, the pain as well as the lesion formation. Given that the fact that standard of care here is extremely poor, there is no disease-modifying therapy out there. One in 10 women do experience endometriosis and have it. We do see this being a large market opportunity of over $4.5 billion. I'll end with this. We have two very exciting phase II readouts coming up within the next 24 months. We have AGA, second half of this year, 13-week, and then followed up with the 26-week and early 2027. We have the endometriosis study starting, and we'll have a phase II readout on that next year. As I mentioned, tune in. Very soon, we're going to have the SAD safety tolerability and PK data out on ABS-201. Like to thank you all for tuning in.