From the Trenches of the 11th Aging Research and Drug Discovery Meeting
ALSO: First-of-its-kind Data Atlas for Cancer Research; Reporting From the Trenches of the 11th Aging Research and Drug Discovery Meeting; Towards 'Synthetic Immune System'
Hi! I am Andrii Buvailo, and this is my weekly newsletter, ‘Where Tech Meets Bio,’ where I talk about technologies, breakthroughs, and great companies moving the biopharma and medtech industries forward.
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Now, let’s get to this week’s topics!
In Brief
🚀 Bioprinting in space! AM Technologies by Brinter will supply its Brinter Core 3D bioprinter for a European Space Agency project to develop the 3D-BioSystem Facility on the ISS, enabling tissue manufacturing in microgravity to advance astronaut health and space exploration.
🚀 FUJIFILM Diosynth Biotechnologies has opened a £100M microbial fermentation facility in Billingham, UK, tripling its production capacity with two 4000-liter fermenters, enhancing its ability to manufacture biologics, vaccines, and advanced therapies, and supporting the production of ophthalmic therapeutics for wet AMD.
🦠 NanoViricides Inc. is advancing its antiviral NV-387 into Phase II trials, using its proprietary nanomedicine platform that mimics host-cell mechanisms to dismantle viruses. This technology targets common viral infection pathways, aiming to reduce the risk of resistance and enhance treatment durability across multiple respiratory viruses, including hashtag#RSV, hashtag#Influenza, and hashtag#COVID19.
🔬 Eli Lilly and Company's tirzepatide significantly reduced the risk of developing Type 2 diabetes by 94% in a late-stage trial, also showing an average 22.9% weight loss in participants, highlighting its dual potential in weight management and diabetes prevention.
🧪 Vandria SA secures $30.7M in Series A funding, led by Hevolution Foundation and Dolby Family Ventures, to advance its mitophagy-inducing drug, VNA-318, into Phase 1 clinical trials for neurodegenerative diseases like Alzheimer's and Parkinson's.
🏆 The biopharma industry ranks among the top sectors for employee wellbeing in the UK, excelling in work-life balance, mental and physical health initiatives, and fostering strong interpersonal relationships, according to Great Place To Work UK's "State of Employee Wellbeing in the Workplace Report 2024."
🔬 Piramidal, a Y Combinator-backed startup, uses AI to decode EEG brainwave data, enhancing neurological diagnostics by improving accuracy and speed in identifying conditions like seizures and brain hemorrhages, especially in ICUs. They are conducting pilot studies at King’s College and Saint Thomas hospitals to validate their AI model.
🖥️ LG AI Research introduces EXAONEPath, a specialized pre-trained model for gigapixel-scale histopathology images. This advancement leverages self-supervised learning to enhance the precision and efficiency of AI-driven medical image analysis.
🦠 Microbiotica advances Phase 1b clinical trials for its microbiome-based therapies aimed at advanced melanoma (MB097) and ulcerative colitis (MB310).
🔬 Flagship Pioneering's Quotient Therapeutics partners with Pfizer to use its Somatic Genomics platform to analyze somatic mutations in patient tissues, aiming to discover novel genetic targets for cardiovascular and renal diseases, supported by Pfizer's cardiometabolic research expertise.
💰 Marketing firm Supreme Group has acquired BioStrata, a Cambridge-based marketing and PR agency specializing in life sciences, expanding its global reach and service offerings. BioStrata will continue as a standalone entity, with its leadership team intact, aiming to enhance Supreme Group's capabilities in serving life science companies.
💉 Novartis' Phase III V-MONO trial reportedly shows Leqvio (inclisiran), an siRNA therapy, significantly reduces LDL-C levels as a monotherapy in low to moderate-risk ASCVD patients, outperforming ezetimibe and placebo; Novartis plans regulatory discussions based on these findings.
💰 NOETIK secures $40 million in Series A funding, led by Polaris Partners with participation from Khosla Ventures and others, to advance AI-driven precision cancer therapies, leveraging its OCTO platform for drug discovery and spatial omics datasets.
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💻 The US Department of Commerce commits $50M to HP for expanding its microfluidics semiconductor fab in Oregon, boosting domestic semiconductor capabilities for life sciences and AI under the CHIPS and Science Act.
🔬 Bayer and NextRNA Therapeutics partner to develop small molecule drugs targeting long non-coding RNA in cancer, with potential financial commitments exceeding $547M, advancing two preclinical programs to address high unmet medical needs in oncology.
🤖 Collaborative Drug Discovery launches CDD AI Support ChatBot, enhancing user support for CDD Vault by providing 24/7 responses to common inquiries without accessing user data, complementing its existing human support team for complex issues.
Noetik Secures $40 Series A, Unveils First-of-its-kind Data Atlas for Cancer Research
💰 San Francisco-based techbio startup Noetik, co-founded and led by Ron Alfa, MD, PhD, previously VP of Research at Recursion (RXRX), has just secures $40 million Series A to further advance its multimodal computational engine OCTO.
OCTO (Oncology Counterfactual Therapeutics Oracle) is an AI model designed to simulate complex patient-specific biology, particularly for cancer research. It uses a transformer architecture trained on multimodal data from thousands of tumor samples, including protein staining, gene expression, DNA sequencing, and histological images.
By integrating these diverse data types, OCTO can predict how different therapeutic interventions might affect individual patients.
The model employs a unique training method called structured multimodal masking to learn the relationships between various biological features.
This capability allows researchers to simulate "what-if" scenarios, aiding in the discovery of targeted cancer therapies and improving personalized treatment strategies.
Noetik has also unveiled a state of the art big data resource Lung BioAtlas, which is the most comprehensive dataset focused on non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC).
Currently, only about 12.5% of cancer patients respond to immunotherapy, underscoring the need for more targeted treatment approaches. So, Noetik is seeking partnerships where different academic and industry organizations could use Lung BioAtlas to make progress towards more precise and informed cancer therapies.
From the Trenches of the 11th Aging Research and Drug Discovery Meeting
I am back from #ARDD2024 which was hosted in picturesque halls of the University of Copenhagen, in Copenhagen downtown. This year’s event was pretty massive, I think the most packed compared to all previous ones of this series.
ARDD2024 features many presentations by folks from the global companies that I found impactful, including an enlightening talk about AI in longevity research delivered by Elena Bonfiglioli, Global Head of Life Science at Microsoft, and the comprehensive introduction to various theories of why we age by Dr Michael Ringel, Managing Director & Senior Partner at Boston Consulting Group (BCG).
Also, I particularly liked the talk by Prof. Nir Barzilai, Director at Einstein Institute for Aging Research at Albert Einstein College of Medicine, who provided a field-wide overview of geroscience and gerotherapeutics currently in development and having the promise of positively changing the definition of what we consider “normal” when we talk about getting old.
I also attended a presentation by Marie Kveiborg, Senior Scientific Lead, Novo Nordisk Foundation, centered around the broader aspect of going from basic biomedical discoveries to clinical translation, through strategic partnering, outlining specific challenges and opportunities pertaining to aging.
The conference is still ongoing as of this moment when I am publishing the newsletter, so make sure to subscribe to my newsletter for the learnings from all these and future presentations -- Where Tech Meets Bio, where I will be sharing those over the coming weeks.
But here I’d like to focus on smaller companies and startups, as I think they hold a lot of interest to the reader both from the partnership and investment standpoints. I briefly classified some company picks, so, here what I’ve got so far: