Bioinformatics-based startup twoXAR has built some bank with $10 million in Series A financing from a trio of firms, the company announced Monday. Leading this Series A infusion is SoftBank Ventures, with Andreessen Horowitz and OS Fund rounding out the triumvirate.
JP Lee, managing director of SoftBank Ventures, will join Andreessen Horowitz general partner Vijay Pande on the twoXAR board of directors. Palo Alto, California-based twoXAR reached this next stage of growth thanks to $3.4 million in seed funding it picked up in 2014 in part from Andreessen Horowitz.
Andrew A. Radin, twoXAR CEO, and Andrew M. Radin, the company’s chief marketing officer, are the otherwise unrelated co-founders of twoXAR, which takes its name from their initials in common (two times Andrew Radin). With this funding, said Andrew A. Radin, “we’re open for business.”
That business is using an AI-based platform to comb through drug candidates in a much shorter time than traditional approaches require. By reducing the initial winnowing period from years to weeks, the Radins say that their drug-discovery platform can deliver candidates for preclinical testing at comparatively dizzying speeds.
The Series A funding may mean they’re open for business, but twoXAR already opened the door a crack with its February 2017 partnership with Santen Pharmaceutical in Osaka, Japan. The two companies teamed up to identify drug candidates for glaucoma treatment, with fruitful outcomes. “We’ve delivered those predictions to them, and the early results are very promising,” said Andrew M. Radin.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
In another partnership with The Asian Liver Center at Stanford University, twoXAR delivered 10 drug candidates from 25,000 possibilities for treatment of hepatocellular carcinoma, and they claim to do so at breakneck speed.
“We went from deciding to do that project to having a set of candidates ready for test in just a couple of months,” asserted Andrew A. Radin.
These proof-of-concept successes from the seed funds sprouted the Series A financing, which in turn will allow twoXAR to branch into several potential areas. Both Radins see growth in the company’s future.
“The seed round was showing how the technology could work, where we were able to take the output and run the preclinical studies” for meaningful outcomes, said Andrew A. Radin. “Now, we’re not working on technology validation, we are working on collaborations. Our goal with this funding is to start a number of new disease projects, six to eight this calendar year.”
What will those disease projects be? “We built this scalable software infrastructure so it’s plug and play for nearly any disease data,” said Andrew M. Radin. That said, their strategy initially will be to focus on diseases that have a relatively clear path to the clinic, such as those in oncology, dermatology, ophthalmology, and immunology. They also will continue with preclinical work on already identified candidates.
Regardless of whether they’re working internally on identifying new candidate molecules or with external partners, said Andrew M. Radin, “we’ll bring the novel intellectual property to the table. For us, it is all about building this portfolio.”
AI in drug discovery is kind of like the Wild West in that many startups are engaged in this very task of speeding up the historically painstaking and slow process. In other words, twoXAR is working in a crowded space.
Photo: ClaudioVentrella, Getty Images.
Correction: An earlier version has been updated to reflect that the money was used to fund preclinical studies, not clinical.
