Iambic Therapeutics (formerly known as Entos) – a biotechnology company developing novel therapeutics from its unique generative AI discovery platform – recently announced the closing of an oversubscribed $100 million Series B financing co-led by Ascenta Capital and Abingworth, and also including new investors NVIDIA, Illumina Ventures, Gradiant Corporation, and independent board member Bill Rastetter. Existing investors also participated, including Nexus Ventures, Catalio Capital Management, Coatue, FreeFlow, OrbiMed, and Sequoia Capital. In connection with the Series B funding round, Iambic is delighted to welcome two new board members, Evan Rachlin, M.D., from Ascenta Capital and Kurt von Emster from Abingworth.
Since the 2021 Series A financing, Iambic has rapidly built its AI-driven discovery platform, which unifies state-of-the-art, physics-informed machine learning and experimental automation and has demonstrated the platform’s success in identifying therapeutic candidates with differentiated drug profiles. Along with building out a deep bench of AI and drug-discovery experts, Iambic has discovered two candidates to advance into the clinic: IAM-H1, a highly selective and brain-penetrant inhibitor of HER2 and its oncogenic mutants, and IAM-C1, a potential first-in-class selective dual CDK2/4 inhibitor to address unmet needs in terms of therapeutic window and treatment resistance in cell-cycle-driven cancers. Plus, Iambic has extended its leadership position in the AI community, creating methods such as NeuralPLexer and OrbNet to drive its discovery platform.
With the funds raised in the Series B round, Iambic plans to advance multiple candidates into clinical development, expand its pipeline with additional candidates with best-in-class and first-in-class potential, and continue to innovate and build next-generation AI and automation technologies for drug discovery. It plans to utilize NVIDIA technology such as the NVIDIA DGX Cloud AI supercomputing platform and the NVIDIA BioNeMo cloud service to accelerate discovery.
Iambic Therapeutics retains the technology created under its prior name of Entos, adopting the new name of Iambic Therapeutics to reflect its transition to a company with the additional capability of clinical development of candidates identified through its AI-driven discovery platform.
KEY QUOTES:
“At Iambic, our world-class team has combined physics and AI to create a differentiated drug discovery platform that achieves a step-change in the speed and success rate for delivering best-in-class and first-in-class development candidates to clinic. With the Series B funding, we intend to advance multiple AI-discovered candidates into the clinic and expand our pipeline, demonstrating how the Iambic platform can deliver better therapeutics to patients in less time, with optimized target product profiles for greater likelihood of clinical success.”
- Tom Miller, Ph.D., Co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of Iambic
“We were struck by the originality of these molecules, offering distinctive approaches in both deeply validated and more novel biological pathways. Iambic’s platform enables a more creative and expansive exploration of how to treat diseases with profound unmet needs. We are delighted to partner with Tom and his extraordinary team in translating these thoroughly tested medicines into humans.”
- Evan Rachlin, M.D., Co-founder and Managing Partner of Ascenta Capital
“Abingworth is proud to support the remarkably talented team at Iambic in its drive to revolutionize drug discovery and speed to the market with highly selective drugs.”
- Kurt von Emster, Managing Partner and Head of Life Sciences at Abingworth
“AI-driven technologies, including methods that Iambic and NVIDIA researchers have built together, are charting a new path for researchers in the discovery of new therapeutic candidates. NVIDIA-accelerated computing and software are helping industry pioneers like Iambic drive scientific breakthroughs and our continued collaboration aims to speed innovation in drug discovery.”
- Rory Kelleher, Director of Healthcare and Life Sciences at NVIDIA
“We believe technology innovations powered by advanced computing and omics-derived data insights will transform drug discovery and pave the way for the next wave of groundbreaking medicines. Iambic’s physics-informed machine learning approach has yielded promising lead candidates with superior profiles in record time.”
- Ron Mazumder, Ph.D., MBA, Partner of Illumina Ventures
