AI-enabled drug discovery company MultiOmic Health has closed a £5m seed funding extension round.
The round was over subscribed and led by London-based Hoxton Ventures, with participation from Ada Ventures, MMC Ventures and Verve Ventures.
Since beginning operations in May 2021, MultiOmic has raised nearly £7m, including an earlier round led by San Francisco-based Fifty Years.
The latest investment will be used to demonstrate proof-of-concept for MultiOmic’s MOHSAIC platform in diabetic kidney disease.
It’s estimate that up to 40 per cent of diabetics eventually develop chronic kidney disease and account an estimated $300bn (£238bn) annually in global healthcare costs.
Robert Thong, MultiOmic’s co-founder and CEO, said: “Existing treatments for metabolic syndrome-related conditions merely reduce risk or delay onset of serious consequences such as heart attack, stroke, kidney failure, blindness, nerve damage, foot amputation, liver failure and premature death.
“Patients’ disease journeys exhibit immense heterogeneity, reflecting potentially hundreds of different disease variants that result not only from inherited genetics, but also diet, lifestyle and other environmental factors.
“Unlike cancer however, there are no existing precision medicines to tackle the specific molecular-level drivers of each metabolic syndrome disease variant.
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“We will address this huge unmet medical need by systematically discovering, at scale, unique treatment concepts for these different disease variants.
“Our human-centric platform originates therapeutics from high fidelity patient data, reversing the traditional drug discovery models that initiate treatments from test tube and animal experiments.
“We are going from bedside to lab bench, rather than from lab bench to bedside!”
Metabolic syndrome is the medical term for a combination of diabetes, high blood pressure (hypertension) and obesity.
Rob Kniaz, partner at Hoxton Ventures, said: “We are very excited to be partnering with Robert and the team at MultiOmic.
“Metabolic syndrome and its resultant medical conditions are the most significant cause of death globally, and this is forecast to increase since Covid survivors are at a much higher of being affected.
“We couldn’t be more bullish about the transformational impact that innovations at the intersection of tech and bio are having on patients – we see tremendous potential in the space.
“Via our investment in MultiOmic, we see a very exciting opportunity to use technology to address an area of high unmet need where conventional approaches have historically failed.”
Charlotte Barttelot, principal at MMC Ventures, said: “After closely analysing the evolving next generation of AI drug discovery platforms, we were impressed by MultiOmic’s approach. Building a computational systems biology engine founded on a deep integrated omics dataset is the only way to address the knowledge gap in metabolic diseases. Robert has assembled a top tier multi-disciplinary team to address this complex data problem.”