Philadelphia-based AI-enabled biotech firm Vivodyne introduced it closed a $38 million seed funding spherical led by Khosla Ventures.
CS Ventures, Kairos Ventures, Bison Ventures and MBX Capital additionally participated within the spherical.
WHAT IT DOES
Vivodyne is a drug discovery firm that makes use of clinically predictive AI to assist establish therapeutic targets and predict a affected person’s response to a drug by testing it on lab-grown human organ tissues.
Using robotic automation, the corporate can dose, domesticate and analyze greater than 10,000 particular person tissues at a time, creating an unlimited variety of human datasets for AI coaching.
The corporate will use the funds to advance its drug-discovery pipeline, in addition to its AI stack.
“By testing medicine and life-saving biologics straight on these real looking human tissues at an unprecedented scale and determination, we are able to enhance the success charges of therapeutics coming into scientific trials,” Alex Morgan, associate at Khosla Ventures, stated in an announcement.
“Vivodyne’s expertise bridges the hole between preclinical R&D and human scientific trials whereas automating each step of the testing pipeline, from rising tissues, dosing, sampling and imaging, to analyzing knowledge. The power to display screen and develop new potential life-saving therapies, testing hundreds at a time on functionally real looking human tissues on Vivodyne’s automated platform, is a serious step ahead for the pharmaceutical trade.”
MARKET SNAPSHOT
Open-source databases and AI-based software program are more and more used to assist in drug discovery. Nonetheless, experts say “thoughts and machine must work in synergy,” with collaboration occurring throughout a number of disciplines, together with academia and trade.
Quite a few corporations are using AI for drug discovery, together with California-based AI drug discovery startup Genesis, which devised its molecular AI platform Genesis Exploration of Molecular Area (GEMS) that merges deep studying and molecular simulations to create high-potency small-molecule medicine.
In August, Genesis scored $200 million in an oversubscribed Series B funding round, bringing its whole elevate to $280 million.
Israel-based AION Labs, an AI-enabled drug-discovery partnership between world pharma and tech corporations, introduced the launch of its second startup, DenovAI, in February.
DenovAI is an AI-enabled computational biophysics platform that may uncover potential antibodies geared toward particular epitopes (the a part of an antigen molecule acknowledged by the immune system to which an antibody attaches itself). The corporate stated its platform will design antibodies from scratch and recommend which candidates will probably make efficient medicine.
AION Labs contains pharma giants AstraZeneca, Merck, Pfizer and Teva, alongside enterprise capital agency Israel Biotech Fund, strategic associate Amazon Web Services and German unbiased analysis institute Bio Med X.
