UK pharmatech company Ignota Labs has raised $6.9 million Seed funding to advance its efforts in rescuing promising but failing drugs.
Drug safety failures are a leading cause of clinical trial failures, preventing over 56 per cent of drugs from reaching patients and costing the pharmaceutical industry more than $400 billion annually.
Ignota Labs addresses this issue by applying deep learning, cheminformatics, and bioinformatics to uncover and resolve the root causes of drug toxicity, unlocking new opportunities for assets that would otherwise be abandoned.
The company employs a novel strategy to build a pipeline of high-value therapies. It identifies promising drug candidates that have been abandoned due to safety concerns — typically 80-90 per cent of the way to success — and uses SAFEPATH to determine the underlying issues and develop solutions.
This model not only reduces development timelines by years and costs by millions, but also offers multi-billion-dollar potential for each recovered therapy.
“We’re thrilled to have the support of this leading investor syndicate in our mission to rescue promising yet struggling drugs with our technology,” said Sam Windsor, CEO and co-founder of Ignota Labs.
“Traditional safety assessments reveal when something is wrong, but our platform goes a step further by identifying the exact molecular and biological issues to provide actionable insights to re-engineer and revive therapies.”
The company successfully in-licensed its first asset, a first-in-class metabolic health drug with the potential to improve the lives of over 1.2 billion post-menopausal women. Using SAFEPATH®, Ignota Labs resolved safety concerns that halted the drug’s progress, validating its findings through rodent models.
Montage Ventures and AIX Ventures co-led the funding with participation from Modi Ventures, Blue Wire Capital, and Gaingels.
“Ignota Labs is solving one of the most critical challenges in drug development, rescuing promising therapies that would otherwise be abandoned due to safety issues,” said Todd Kimmel, Founder and Managing Partner of Montage Ventures.
According to Krish Ramadurai, Partner at AIX Ventures, Ignota is redefining drug development and pioneering a new era of predictive and engineerable biology:
“Their approach shifts biopharmaceutical R&D from trial-and-error to a rational, data-driven process, enabling molecules to be precisely refined at scale to accelerate clinical development.
I’m incredibly excited about their potential to transform AI-driven drug discovery and unlock massive value from previously failed assets to improve patient outcomes.”
The funding will be used to expand ignota's pipeline by acquiring additional distressed assets and for advancement into early-stage clinical trials of their first asset, a PDE9A inhibitor.
Lead image: Jordan Lane, Layla Hosseini-Gerami, and Sam Windsor. Photo: uncredited.
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