AI-biotech startups: top five major deals
AI for Drug Discovery
According to a new report published by Allied Market Research and titled “Artificial Intelligence for Drug Development and Discovery Market", the global Artificial Intelligence in drug discovery market generated $520.00 million in 2019, and is estimated to reach $4.81 billion by 2027, registering a CAGR of 31.6% from 2020 to 2027.
In particular, last year, there has been an increasing number of late-stage mega-rounds (e.g. B, C), including hundreds of millions and some of the major deals (AI for Drug Discovery by DKA) included:
- Insitro with their $143 million Series B in 2020 and $400 million Series C in 2021 (total $743M);
- XtalPi with their $319 million Series C (total $386.4M);
- Atomwise with their $123 million Series B (total $176.6M);
- Recursion Pharmaceuticals with their $239 million series D (total $465.4M); and
- AbCellera with their $105 million Series B (total $296.2M).
Let's see now what these AI biotech startups are engaged with:
💊🤖🚀Insitro (California US, 2018) integrates ML techniques for drug development, to create predictive models for disease and drug delivery.
Their predictive models are grounded in human data, by deriving insights from genetic, phenotypic and clinical data, using ML to increase the power of traditional genetic analyses by moving closer to the underlying architecture and biology of disease.
In particular, they combine patient-derived, induced pluripotent stem cells (iPSCs), genome editing, high content cellular phenotyping and ML to build in vitro models of disease. And they design their disease models to be maximally predictive of human clinical outcomes by optimising for genetics, cell-type, environment and multidimensional data collection, using a massive amounts of high quality data. The outcome is an integrated model of disease spanning in vitro cellular systems and in silico machine learning models — an insitro model.
For example, the Insitro Human (ISH) platform applies ML, human genetics and functional genomics to generate and optimise unique in vitro models and drive therapeutic discovery and development. In spring 2019 Gilead and Insitro announced that the companies have entered into a strategic collaboration to discover and develop therapies for patients with nonalcoholic steatohepatitis (NASH) using the ISH platform. Gilead can advance up to five targets identified through this collaboration and is responsible for chemistry and development against these targets.
On May 2020 it was announced that Insitro has raised $143 million in an oversubscribed Series B financing. And on March 2021, Insitro raised $400M for its ML-powered drug discovery efforts.
Insitro has acquired Haystack Sciences on Oct 22, 2020, a company for synthesising, breeding and analysing large, diverse combinatorial chemical libraries encoded by unique DNA sequences (DNA-Encoded Libraries, or DELs), establishing in this way a revolutionary data-intensive platform for discovering new cures for difficult-to-treat disorders.
Investors (19 investors): Foresite Capital, Third Rock Ventures, Andreessen Horowitz, ARCH Venture Partners, GV, Alexandria Venture Investments, BlackRock, HOF Capital, Canada Pension Plan Investment Board, Casdin Capital, Temasek Holdings, T. Rowe Price
💊🤖🚀XtalPi (Massachusetts US, 2014) is a computation-driven startup integrating quantum physics, AI and cloud computing to empower pharmaceutical research.
XtalPi (Also Known As 晶泰科技) is reinventing the industry’s approach to drug research and development with its Intelligent Digital Drug Discovery and Development (ID4) platform. With tightly interwoven quantum physics, AI and high-performance cloud computing algorithms, XtalPi’s ID4 platform provides accurate predictions on the physiochemical and pharmaceutical properties of small-molecule candidates for drug design, solid-form selection and other critical aspects of drug development.
XtalPi’s ID4 platform provides accurate predictions on the physiochemical and pharmaceutical properties of small-molecule candidates for drug design, solid-form selection and other critical aspects of drug development.
On Sptember 2020, XtalPi landed a massive $319M SoftBank-led round C to continue its AI drug development platform. On March 23, 2021, XtalPi announced its investment ($46 million led by BGF with participation from XtalPi) in the Series B financing of PhoreMost, a UK-based biopharmaceutical company dedicated to 'Drugging the Undruggable®' disease targets. The two companies have an ongoing AI drug discovery collaboration that started in 2020, where XtalPi is leveraging its ID4 platform to generate ultra-large chemical spaces and discover high-quality lead compounds against "undruggable" oncology targets identified by PhoreMost.
Investors (12 investors): Alphabet, China Life Healthcare Fund, FREES FUND, Sequoia Capital China, Susquehanna International Group (SIG), Tencent Holdings, Yael Capital Management Limited, ZhenFund, PICC Capital Investment Management, 5Y Capital, SoftBank Vision Fund
💊🤖🚀Atomwise (San Francisco US, 2012) is a pioneer of harnessing AI for drug discovery.
Atomwise invented the first deep-learning AI technology for structure-based small molecule drug discovery (publications) and holds patents (IP estate with 19 issued and 12 pending patent applications) for applying convolutional networks to spatial data. They leverage technology similar to that used for image recognition to help medicinal chemists to discover better medicines and faster.
Their strategy is "Drug The Undruggable": In particular, the majority of the human genome remains undrugged, representing 96% of all human gene targets. Of the roughly 20ooo proteins encoded in the human genome,
- only a little over 750 are targeted by FDA-approved small molecule drugs,
- about 2000-3000 have a small molecule or a biologic under development, and
- about 4000 genes have experimental evidence linking them to human disease, but may not yet have enough structural data for traditional drug design.
Consequently, all these proteins are ready for de novo drug discovery to be immediately explored with Atomwise's technology, representing a potential 4-fold increase beyond the total number of available FDA-approved drugs existing today. The remaining human gene targets represent novel biology.
For this reason, Atomwise performs hundreds of projects per year in partnership with some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical and agrochemical companies (Biopharma Partnerships), as well as more than 200 universities and hospitals in 40 countries (Research Partnerships). They have 500+ active projects with 400+ unique target and 80+ targets with validated hits (pipeline).
On Sept 2019, Atomwise and Hansoh Pharma (is a research and development driven pharmaceutical company in China) announced an AI drug discovery deal that could be worth $1.5 billion, the largest US-China collaboration in the field, and on August 2020 Atomowise raised $123 million to accelerate drug discovery.
Investors (22 investors): Baidu Ventures, AME Cloud Ventures, B Capital Group, Data Collective DCVC, DFJ Growth, Dolby Family Ventures, Draper Associates, Mission and Market, Monsanto Growth Ventures (MGV), OS Fund, Tencent Holdings, DFJ, Khosla Ventures, Y Combinator, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Sanabil, Colorcon, Baidu Ventures, Touchdown Ventures
💊🤖🚀Recursion Pharmaceuticals (Utah US, 2013) combines experimental biology, automation and AI in a massively parallel system to quickly and efficiently identify treatments for any disease.
At Recursion’s headquarters, clusters of robots treat millions of cells per week with drugs, stain them with six dyes and then take pictures/images to capture and quantify as many morphological features as they can. By pushing these data through a ML pipeline, they hope to find relationships that are invisible to the human eye and to tease out clusters of effects that can guide their drug discovery efforts.
They claim to have one of the largest, broadest and deepest pipelines of any technology-enabled drug discovery company, central to the Recursion Operating System (‘OS’), an integrated, multi-faceted system for generating, analysing and deriving insight from massive biological and chemical datasets to industrialise drug discovery composed of: Infrastructure Layer of enabling hardware and software, The Recursion Data Universe (which houses our diverse and expansive datasets) and The Recursion Map, a suite of proprietary discovery, design and development tools.
On September 2020, Recursion secured $239 million in equity financing to advance its technology enabled Drug Discovery Platform and Pipeline. And on March 2021, Recursion has filed for an initial public offering, seeking to sell $100 million worth of shares. The company reported a net loss of $2.4 million, or $5.99 a share, on revenue of $4 million in 2020, compared with a net loss of $4.30 a share on revenue of $2.3 million in 2019.
Investors (28 investors): Advantage Capital, AME Cloud Ventures, Data Collective DCVC, EPIC Ventures, Menlo Ventures, Mubadala Investment Company, Obvious Ventures, Square 1 Bank, Two Sigma Ventures, Wild Basin Investments, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, CRV, Felicis Ventures, Lux Capital, National Institutes of Health.
💊🤖🚀 AbCellera (Vancouver, Canada, 2012) is an AI-powered therapeutic antibody.
With their full-stack AI-powered antibody discovery platform they search, decode and analyse natural immune systems to find antibodies that their partners can develop into drugs that improve health. They combine proprietary repertoire sequencing technologies with functional data from single B cells to annotate immune repertoires and boost the number of candidates and they explore large multidimensional data with Celium™, their proprietary antibody visualization software.
On May 2020, AbCellera announced that it has closed a US$105 million Series B financing, led by OrbiMed and current investor DCVC Bio, with an investor syndicate that includes Viking Global Investors, Peter Thiel, Founders Fund, Eli Lilly and Company, University of Minnesota, and Presight Capital. And AbCellera's stock is lower by -56.69% since December 11, 2020 when AbCellera began trading.
Investors (11 investors): Eli Lilly, Presight Capital, Founders Fund, OrbiMed, Peter Thiel, Viking Global Investors, University of Minnesota, DCVC Bio, Government of Canada, Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation
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