ReviveMed Inc., today announced it has closed an oversubscribed seed round of $1.5 million to advance its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven platform that unlocks the value of metabolomics data for drug discovery and development. Rivas Capital led the round, which also included participation from several institutional investors including TechU, Team Builder Ventures, and WorldQuant Ventures.
“Metabolomics data provide a critical link between the activity of genes and proteins, and phenotypic behavior in normal and disease states,” said Dr. Leila Pirhaji, Founder and CEO of ReviveMed. “However, despite its potential, metabolomics has been greatly underutilized due to the difficulty of identifying a large number of metabolites in each patient. Our platform for the first time enables the rapid, high-throughput and cost-effective application of metabolic data to discover new disease mechanisms for drug discovery and, simultaneously metabolomic biomarkers to identify which patients stand to benefit by targeting the disease mechanism.”
Dr. Pirhaji noted that initial proof of concept studies with the platform were published in Nature Methods. These studies illuminated disease pathways, new effects of existing drugs, and novel therapeutic targets in Huntington’s disease.
In connection with the financing, Carlos Gonzalez will join the ReviveMed board of directors. Mr. Gonzalez is the founder of Rivas Capital, a private investment firm focused on breakthrough technology businesses. “ReviveMed has made great progress in demonstrating the enormous potential of its platform, through several initial collaborations with leading pharmaceutical companies, including a top three pharma company,” said Mr. Gonzalez. “The financing will allow the company to continue scaling the platform and begin building its internal drug discovery pipeline.”
ReviveMed’s initial internal discovery program is in metabolic diseases and focused specifically on non-alcohol fatty liver disease (NASH).
Prof. Ernest Fraenkel of MIT, co-founder and board member of ReviveMed, further commented, “ReviveMed’s combination of AI and metabolomics is unique, and has the potential to open entirely new therapeutic directions.”
Source: BusinessWire.com