Innovative TechBio Ideas: AI/ML tools, startups, companies and investors (3rd part)
Innovative TechBio Ideas: AI/ML tools, startups, companies and investors (3rd part)
MetaphysicalCells: A newsletter about Science, Technology and AI Drug Discovery
For the first part: “Innovative TechBio Ideas: AI/ML tools, startups, companies and investors”.
For the second part: “Innovative TechBio Ideas: AI/ML tools, startups, companies and investors (2nd part)”.
Today’s Quote
"Humans are actually reservoir hosts for countless bacteria and viruses that haven’t even been classified yet. About twenty percent of the genetic information in the nose doesn’t match any known or cataloged organism. In the gut, forty to fifty percent of all the DNA is from bacteria and viruses that have never been classified."
By A.G. Riddle (The Atlantis Plague (The Origin Mystery, #2))
Fresh News 🎣
🐟 AI firm Relation Therapeutics has $35M in new seed financing (a total funding of $65.3M over 3 rounds) in a round led by DCVC and co-led by NVIDIA’s venture, NVentures.
Relation Therapeutics in UK utilizes GPU accelerated generative ML techniques to combine data from human genetics, single-cell omics, functional genomic and ML in a single, engineered design to transform drug discovery (ActiveGraph ML). Relation is also pioneering a “Lab-in-the-Loop” that can integrate active learning at every step of drug discovery, from predicting cell states to the validation of new targets.
On February 22, 2023, Relation announced the opening of its flagship integrated wet–dry laboratory and offices—that comprise 5,500 sq ft—located at the heart of London’s Knowledge Quarter.
Flagship pioneering
Flagship Pioneering is an American life sciences venture capital company based in Cambridge, Massachusetts that invests in biotechnology, life sciences, health and sustainability companies. Founded in 2000 by Noubar Afeyan—he is also co-founder and Board Chairman of Moderna—Flagship Pioneering has been just named to Fast Company’s prestigious list of the World’s Most Innovative Companies of 2024, ranking as the #3 most innovative company in North America. This is the third consecutive year Flagship has been named to the list, moving up two spots since 2023.
Pioneering Medicines—within the ecosystem of Flagship Pioneering companies, namely more than 40 companies across the Flagship ecosystem—is an initiative focused on conceiving and developing a unique portfolio of life-changing treatments for patients, by leveraging the innovative scientific platforms and technologies.
On February 16, 2023, Pioneering Medicines announced a deal to use Charles River’s Logica platform. More precisely, Logica was launched by Charles River and its strategic partner Valo Health, and is a customized drug discovery solution from target discovery to preclinical development that is transforming drug discovery. The platform provides an integrated AI-driven closed loop process that aligns outputs to customer needs and is comprised of two products:
✔ Logica-AL: offering a lead compound option with desired characteristics such as ADME and selectivity, optimized for customer preferences and whose advancability has been extensively evaluated and simulated to maximise downstream probability of success. And
✔ Logica-C: offering a drug candidate option that leverages promising chemical matter and program-optimized predictive models, to impact the success rate of each experiment and rapidly advance the program. Delivering in this way a development candidate that has undergone safety and efficacy tests and is ready for IND enabling studies.
On November 1, 2023, Flagship Pioneering launched Pioneering Intelligence, an initiative of Flagship Pioneering harnessing AI to accelerate innovation in the life sciences and beyond, by building unique AI and ML know-how to augment the capabilities of Flagship companies. In fact, across the Flagship ecosystem several companies are building out AI-enabled platforms to transform drug discovery and speed up the drug development process. For example:
⚓ Cellarity—funded in 2017 in Flagship Labs (Flagship's innovation foundry) by Noubar Afeyan and Avak Kahvejian—has developed a broad platform harnessing single-cell technologies and ML to unveil the network state of a given cell, defining the cell's behavior. Until now, the dominant approach in drug discovery has been to reduce disease biology into a single molecular target and then leverage high-throughput screening to identify molecules that bind to these targets. But at Cellarity, they focus on the whole cell because, most often, a disease isn’t driven by one mechanism or protein, accordingly they use single-cell technologies to identify the cellular drivers of the transition from health to disease and then apply DL models to create drugs that reverse disease at the cellular level. Cellarity has raised a total of $294M.
On July 27, 2023, Cellarity announced that The Galien Foundation—the premier global institution dedicated to honoring innovators in life sciences—named Cellarity a 2023 Prix Galien USA Award nominee for "Best Startup”.
In October, 2023, Cellarity announced a partnership with the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative to drive innovation in ML algorithms for single-cell analysis via support of the Open Problems in Single-Cell Analysis initiative.
On January 4, 2024, Cellarity announced the expansion of its collaboration with Novo Nordisk A/S, to further leverage Novo Nordisk’s expertise in metabolic disease and Cellarity’s proprietary platform technology to unlock a new potential therapy for Nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (MASH), for which there are no currently approved treatments.
⚓ Valo founded by David Berry in early 2019 is also applying AI to human data, reducing the cost and time of drug development while increasing confidence the medicines will work. In total Valo has raised $460M.
On April 5, 2022, Valo Health announced the acquisition of TARA Biosystems, Inc., a New York City-based cardiovascular disease biotechnology company, creating the first of its kind vertically integrated cardiovascular drug discovery and development platform. The combination of TARA’s proprietary human three-dimensional tissue engineering and cardiac disease modeling capabilities with Valo’s Opal Computational Platform™ positions Valo to transform cardiovascular disease drug discovery and development.
⚓ On March 2, 2022, Flagship Pioneering unveiled Vesalius Therapeutics, co-founded by Doug Cole, M.D—managing partner at Flagship Pioneering—and Christopher Austin, M.D.—former director of the National Center for Advancing Translational Sciences (NCATS) within the National Institutes of Health (NIH)—who will lead the company as CEO. Vesalius’ DIAMOND™ platform combines data from large clinical databases, genetics and genomics information, AI and ML, and proprietary experimental models to redefine how we think about and treat common illnesses like autoimmune disorders, diabetes, and neurologic diseases such as Alzheimer’s. Flagship initially committed $75M to support the development of Vesalius’ platform and initial pipeline of new medicines.
Flagship Pioneering has raised a total of $5.4B across 9 funds, their latest being Flagship Pioneering Fund VII.
Totus Medicines
Totus Medicines has the world’s most comprehensive library of covalent chemistries—the Totus Platform that learns as the library grows—which it pairs with ultra-high throughput cell-based screening (using their proprietary tagging technology for cellular analysis) and an AI/ML-powered drug design portal. By applying large-scale ML to their massive data lake, they are mapping fundamental pharmacophores and target relationships across the proteome. Neil Dhawan Ph. D, Jimmy Blair Ph. D and Jason Pontin are the founders of Totus Medicines.
In 2023, Totus was named by Biospace as one of the “Top Life Sciences Startups to Watch in 2023”, notable for their unique drug discovery platform that aims to make every human disease druggable. In December 17, 2023, Totus closed a $66M Series B financing. The round was led by DCVC Bio with participation from North Pond Ventures, Camford Capital and the Regents of the University of Minnesota.
Totus Medicines has raised a total funding of $108M over 2 rounds.
Let’s now see some notable AI Pharma Deals for the period 2022-2023. 🥂