From base­ment lab to Wall Street: Ab­sci looks to bring its 'pro­tein print­ing' plat­form pub­lic

Sean Mc­Clain start­ed Ab­sci as a 22-year-old col­lege grad­u­ate in a small base­ment lab — or as he called it, a “dun­geon lab” — in down­town Port­land, OR. Ten years lat­er, he’s tak­ing the com­pa­ny pub­lic.

Ab­sci filed S-1 pa­pers on Wednes­day, pen­cil­ing in a $100 mil­lion raise — though many com­pa­nies in the last year have gone on to raise much more than their ini­tial es­ti­mates.

What start­ed as Mc­Clain’s search for a more ef­fi­cient way to man­u­fac­ture pro­teins in E. coli has led to the biotech’s pro­tein print­ing plat­form, which the team hopes can short­en the R&D process. They’ve moved out of the base­ment lab, and Mc­Clain said back in April that he plans to in­crease the staff to 225 by the end of this year.

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