Quris Technologies plans to hire additional staff and seek more partners to develop its artificial-intelligence-based drug discovery platform.
The Boston- and Tel Aviv-based biotech and technology developer completed a $28 million funding round this week, attracting investment from Welltech Ventures, iAngels and GlenRock Capital.
The plan is to use the financing to build scale to support BioAI, an automated, self-training AI platform that predicts the clinical safety and efficacy of potential drug candidates Quris launched last October.
CEO Isaac Bentwich said, “Now is the time to tap technology to transform drug development and end the costly cycle of failed clinical trials.
“The added investor support will help Quris grow the team and partnerships needed to create a clear view to predict the clinical safety of drugs for individual patients,” Bentwich said. “With the technology advances at our disposal, we can close the clinical prediction gap.”
Quris pitches BioAI as a candidate screening technology that is better at identifying drug candidates than animal models are.
Central to the approach are “patients-on-a-chip,” a genetically diverse group of stem-cell-derived human tissue models created in collaboration with the New York Stem Cell Foundation.
Nanoscale sensors are used to monitor how these “patients” react when exposed to thousands of known drugs. The resulting data are used to train the AI system to identify compounds with the desired safety and efficacy profiles.
Quris said the approach can help developers “avoid the tremendous risks and costs of failed clinical trials and eliminate the reliance on ineffective animal testing.”
The firm’s current focus is using BioAI to find treatments for rare genetic diseases that cannot be screened in current preclinical models. Its most advanced candidate is a potential treatment for fragile X syndrome and is due to enter trials this year.