Attovia Therapeutics is a spinout of another Californian biotech, Alamar Biosciences, and helmed by Tao Fu, a Frazier Life Sciences venture partner and former senior executive at Zai Lab and Portola Pharmaceuticals.

Attovia’s platform is built around what it terms “Attobody” technology, which is designed to create drugs that more effectively bind to hard-to-reach targets such as G protein-coupled receptors, or GPCRs.

Attovia will use nanobodies, or small antibody fragments, to create drugs that can bind closely to multiple sites on the same target. The company envisions these “biparatropic nanobodies” as the foundation for several different types of therapies, like antibody-drug conjugates, radioconjugates or multi-specific antibodies. It also claims to have technology that can discover these nanobodies more quickly.