- Enveda Biosciences recently announced that it raised a seed round of funding of $4.9 million led by True Ventures. These are the details.
Enveda Biosciences recently announced that it raised a seed round of funding of $4.9 million led by True Ventures with participation from Wireframe Ventures, Village Global, and angel investor Chris Gibson (co-founder and CEO of Recursion). This round of seed funding will enable Enveda to grow its medicinal plant dataset, enhance its technologies and algorithms to further accelerate natural product drug discovery, and advance its lead asset for liver fibrosis through preclinical development.
The Enveda platform includes the world’s largest database of anthropological, chemical, and biological data from medicinal plants. And utilizing this database of hundreds of thousands of unique chemicals and their links to biological signatures, Enveda’s machine learning algorithms predict new chemicals with the potential to treat complex diseases. These chemicals are then further optimized in laboratory studies by Enveda’s team of biologists and medicinal chemists to deliver validated first-in-class drug candidates.
Natural products have led to numerous landmark drugs including aspirin, metformin, morphine, and quinine. And they have also inspired more than 20% of the new drugs that have been approved since 1981. But natural product drug discovery presents several challenges that have reduced industry interest, including the inability to identify and isolate novel bioactive molecules responsible for a desired effect.
And Enveda’s platform utilizes cutting-edge advances in knowledge graphs, metabolomics, and machine learning to identify novel bioactive molecules of interest. For example, the core technology behind Enveda’s platform (validated by multiple peer-reviewed publications) was able to identify the specific antiviral molecules in E Dendroides, a Mediterranean shrub used for thousands of years for the treatment of warts.
Within a few hours, a problem that had plagued researchers for over a decade was solved. And by learning patterns like bioactivity in molecules from thousands of plants, Enveda’s platform also identifies chemical modifications to create patentable drug candidates.
So far, Enveda has validated three candidates – which target the liver fibrosis, inflammation, and neurodegenerative markets. And the company has multiple additional programs in the pipeline and will develop a focused portfolio of candidates while seeking strategic partners in other areas.
KEY QUOTES:
“Traditional synthetic chemical libraries used in drug discovery today scratch only a tiny fraction of bioactive chemical space. Enveda’s platform leverages 450 million years of evolutionary ingenuity to discover and develop an entirely new class of medicines.”
– Viswa Colluru, Ph.D. and Enveda’s founding CEO
“Nature provides us with so much inspiration that can be used for drug discovery, but until recently, studying molecules from the natural world was very difficult. We previously didn’t have the knowledge to efficiently identify the specific bioactive plant chemical from the thousands of other unknown chemicals that are present. We now have the tools to both rapidly identify and translate these molecules found in the natural world into successful medicines.”
– Pieter Dorrestein, Enveda’s scientific co-founder
“We’re deeply interested in supporting founders who see nature as a key partner in unlocking insights for new therapeutics. Viswa and his team are systematically evolving what we know about the medicinal value of plants and how they might help human health with their platform.”
– Rohit Sharma, partner at True Ventures
“In our early hit identification work at Enveda, we access the tremendous diversity that exists in natural products from plants, which are often attractive, drug-like small molecules—what we call good hits! This approach provides our medicinal chemists the opportunity to use the unique features found in these hits to optimize and discover new chemical entities that differ from those found using more traditional methods.”
– Bryan Norman, Enveda’s vice president of drug discovery
