CytoReason, an Israeli startup developing computational models to map and compare treatments, announced it has secured $80 million in funding.
Participants in the round included Pfizer, OurCrowd, NVIDIA and Thermo Fisher Scientific.
What it does
CytoReason provides life sciences companies with AI-enabled tools to glean data-driven molecular-level insights to improve the success rate of Phase 2 clinical trials and optimize research and development.
The company’s models provide insights into datasets and literature, cellular states, drivers of disease progression over time, disease variability between patients, cellular composition, cellular interactions based on biological features within tissues, and the impact of different treatments on disease.
The company plans to use the funding to expand use of its models for various indications, increase its molecular and clinical data, and open an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts later this year.
“The rapid expansion of emerging technologies like artificial intelligence holds great potential to revolutionize human health outcomes,” Mikael Dolsteyn, Pfizer’s chief scientific officer and president of global research, development and medicine, said in a statement.
“Our collaboration with CytoReason will leverage their cutting-edge immuno-multi-omics platform to enhance Pfizer’s own research and development capabilities and generate valuable insights into drug development pathways for patients. We are pleased with the company’s recent growth and look forward to our continued collaboration.”
Market Snapshot
CytoReason began a partnership with pharmaceutical giant Pfizer in 2019 to enable the company to use its biological models in its drug development programs.
The two companies expanded their collaboration in 2022, with Pfizer making a $20 million equity investment in CytoReason and granting it an option to license its platform and disease models. It also plans to fund additional projects. The contract could be worth up to $100 million over five years.
Other companies using AI in drug discovery include: EvolutionaryScale applies biology-focused language models to drug discovery and therapeutic development. The company recently announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services and secured $142 million in seed funding.
Google Research and Google DeepMind has announced the development of an LLM for drug discovery and therapeutic development called Tx-LLM, leveraging the company’s generative AI technology, MedPaLM-2.
LLM builds its Therapeutics instruction Tuning (TxT) collection by interleaving free-text instructions with small molecule representations.
TxT was then used to accelerate and fine-tune a therapeutics large-scale language model, Tx-LLM, to solve classification, regression and generation tasks involved in drug discovery and therapeutics development.
Google They say Tx-LLM holds promise as an end-to-end therapeutic development assistant.
