Drug discovery startup Engine Biosciences has leveraged its computational technology into potential new drugs for itself and its pharmaceutical partners. Now the company has $43 million in financing to continue that work as it looks ahead to its first clinical trials.
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The Series A round of funding announced Wednesday was led by Polaris Partners.
Engine, which splits its operations, between San Carlos, California, and Singapore, is initially focusing on discovering drugs for cancer. The company applies computational tools to patient and disease datasets. The technology analyzes how the 20,000 genes in the human genome interact with each other, searching for the errors in genetic code that lead to disease. This technology is called NetMAPPR.
A second Engine technology called CombiGEM runs experiments on the data, yielding biological insights that prioritize genes for drug discovery and development. The company contends its approach can search a wider expanse of biology and do so more quickly and less expensively than conventional drug discovery techniques.
Engine emerged in 2018, backed by $10 million in seed funding and partnerships in place with one Fortune 500 company as well as research institutions—none of them named. The startup’s partners are still undisclosed. But Engine is starting to reveal a little more about its disease targets. The company said it has performed several large-scale computational and experimental cycles assessing genetic interactions and their relevance to multiple cancers. That research has led to targeted therapies for genetically defined groups of patients who have liver, ovarian, colorectal, and breast cancers.
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The Engine drugs will be small molecule inhibitors. The company said it will use the new financing to expand this pipeline of precision cancer drugs and prepare for its first clinical trials. Engine will also use the cash to expand its technology platform. That expansion could take Engine’s R&D beyond cancer. The company said that through its collaborations, the company has demonstrated the applicability of its technology to other disease areas.
Besides Polaris, additional new Engine investors include Invus and an undisclosed Singapore-based institutional investor. Earlier investors also joined the latest financing, including 6 Dimensions Capital, WuXi AppTec, DHVC, EDBI, Baidu Ventures, Vectr Ventures, Goodman Capital, WI Harper, and Nest.Bio. With the close of the Series A round, Amy Schulman, managing partner at Polaris, has joined Engine’s board of directors.
“Engine’s distinct combination of biology, technology, and drug discovery, as well as its global perspective, may well enable the company to be particularly capable of realizing the promise of artificial intelligence in drug discovery and tackling a wide variety of diseases,” Schulman said in a prepared statement.
Photo by Flickr user steviep187 via a Creative Commons license
