And they're seeing the results, which is now reinforcing that you can really cut time," Amol Jadhav, analyst at consulting firm Frost & Sullivan, told Business Insider.
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For example, Atomwise, which designs drugs that companies can then test out, raised $45 million in its series A round on March 7. Radin, the CEO, said.Īpplying artificial intelligence to drug discovery - which can often be a long, expensive process - has started attracting more attention from investors. With that successful proof of concept, the series A funding will be used to open the company up for business and take on more projects, Andrew A.
The drug, TwoXar said, showed "positive results in cell-based assays." In 2017, TwoXar collaborated with the Asian Liver Center at Stanford to discover TXR-311, an experimental drug for liver cancer. To start, the plan is to go into areas like cancer, dermatology, ophthalmology, and immunology. TwoXar also plans to discover drugs on its own. The startup charges for that work, but once it's done, the drug candidate goes back into the pharmaceutical company's hands. TwoXar can pick it up from there, finding the targets, designing the drugs, and getting them ready to put into preclinical, animal testing. Should a pharma company decide to work with TwoXar on it, the company could say it's looking for new treatments in a particular disease area, like diabetes. This can be a lengthy process involving a lot of lab work and uncertainty over whether the drug will work when it is tested on animals. Traditionally, that company would seek to figure out the science behind a particular disease, working to find disease targets it could then design drugs to go after. To see how that works, picture a pharmaceutical company on the hunt for new drugs to develop. "Basically, they're all purely software-based - they don't even have their own lab," Lee said.
TwoXar's software-based drug-discovery platform fit the bill. JP Lee, a managing director at SoftBank Ventures, told Business Insider that the firm had been looking for investments in which artificial intelligence could be used to save time or cost. The name TwoXar is a nod to the founders' having the same name (two times their initials, AR). The series A round was led by SoftBank Ventures, with Andreessen Horowitz and OS Fund joining in.
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TwoXar, a startup with software designed to discover new drugs, just raised $10 million.