A West Coast startup has raised a venture capital funding round for its psychiatric and neurological drug-discovery platform.
San Francisco-based System1 Biosciences said Wednesday that it had raised $25 million in a Series A financing round, co-led by Pfizer Ventures and CRV, with participation from Alexandria Venture Investments, Dolby Family Ventures, Longevity Fund, Riot Ventures, Kinled Holding, Wilmot Ventures, Webb Investment Network, Liquid 2 Ventures and Boom Capital.
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The company plans to use the money to fund its drug-discovery programs, which are focused on epilepsy, autism and schizophrenia.
System1’s platform involves of using stem cell lines from patients with brain diseases to create cerebral organoids, described as three-dimensional in vitro systems allowing researchers to identify potential compounds that it hypothesizes as more likely to be clinically efficacious than those found using standard methods of drug discovery. The organoids are developed using robotic automation, which the company says would permit collection of a dataset across multiple modes of biological measurement and under multiple conditions. The company says analyzing the resulting data streams yields systems-level characterizations that it calls “deep phenotypes” that it can then use to identify potential drug targets and treatments for neurological and psychiatric diseases.
System1 isn’t the only company to apply a software approach to drug discovery and development. Several companies have popped up in recent years using similar approaches, particularly those that employ artificial intelligence and machine learning to the process, often attracting large amounts of funding from venture capital and big drugmakers. However, it remains a new field, and most efforts remain in very early stages.
Some companies have made significant progress. In July, Salt Lake City-based drugmaker Recursion received Food and Drug Administration clearance for its Investigational New Drug application to start a Phase I study of a drug discovered through machine learning, and the company has the goal of discovering 100 drugs through AI/ML by 2025.
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