NY-based biotech startup OneThree Biotech just announced its latest round of funding. In addition, it’s giving back to help researchers find a treatment for COVID-19.
The company closed on $2.5 million in seed funding this week, with Primary Venture Partners and Meridian Street Capital co-leading the round.
OneThree Biotech started in 2018 and is a graduate of Cornell Tech’s Runway Startup program. The company has created a platform that uses artificial intelligence to optimize drug discovery and development. Its technology can predict new potential therapeutics and identify specific biological mechanisms related to a drug’s efficacy. The new funding will help the company build out this platform.
In turn, OneThree Biotech also announced that it’s providing free toxicity screening to academic or medical researchers who are developing drugs to treat COVID-19. Toxicity screening is an important part of drug creation, and involves analyzing how the concentration of a drug in the body can influence specific organs, or predict adverse effects. By offering this tool to researchers for free, the company may help speed up their drug creation process.
“In early drug development understanding the biology driving a prediction is often times more important than the prediction itself,” Neel Madhukar, the company's CEO and co-founder, said in a statement. “However, when we took a look at existing AI platforms being used for drug discovery we found that most were only answering the ‘what’ without any insight into the ‘why.’ This is why we built OneThree.”
