AI drug developer Deep Genomics said it closed a $40 million series B financing round that will be used to develop new treatments for rare genetic diseases and to expand the company’s proprietary AI discovery platform.
Photo: Brendan Frey, CEO of Deep Genomics
Future Ventures, which has backed companies such as Tesla and SpaceX, and Amplitude Ventures participated in the round.
“For over twenty years, our team at Future Ventures has backed visionary companies seeking to change the world for the better,” said Steve Jurvetson, co-founder of Future Ventures. “Deep Genomics has pioneered a better way to systematically discover new therapies with a much higher success rate than traditional pharma methods.
Deep Genomics uses AI to power every stage of drug development, from identifying therapeutic targets that were previously dismissed as being undruggable, to designing novel therapeutic candidates, to designing animal models.
The company said their approach allows it to move with great speed. Some 70 percent of research projects have led to therapeutic leads, and programs have been taken from target discovery to drug candidate in less than 12 months. The company plans to advance two programs to applications for human clinical trials in 2020 and obtain phase 1/2 data for its Wilson disease candidate in 2021.
“Therapeutically re-engineering the human genome is the final frontier. Doing so requires systems that can predict information pertaining to the genome, and the best technology we have for prediction is AI,” said Brendan Frey, founder and CEO of Deep Genomics. “We have found that the more we explore the universe of genetic therapies using AI, the more we discover dark regions that can be illuminated only with the development of new technology. This financing will enable us to expand our AI technology in the pursuit of new therapeutic opportunities, to advance our Wilson program into the clinic, and to strategically partner assets emerging from our overflowing preclinical pipeline.”
Author: Rare Daily Staff
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