Ignota Labs, an AI-based drug turnaround company, announced the closing of a $6.9 million (GBP 5.5 million) seed funding round, co-led by Montage Ventures and AIX Ventures, with participation from Modi Ventures, Blue Wire Capital, and Gaingels. This funding round will expand the pipeline by acquiring additional distressed assets and advancing their first asset, a PDE9A inhibitor, into early-stage clinical trials.
Drug safety issues are a leading cause of clinical trial failures, preventing a large percentage of drugs from reaching patients and costing the pharmaceutical industry hundreds of billions annually. Ignota Labs tackles this issue by applying deep learning, cheminformatics, and bioinformatics to uncover and resolve the root causes of drug toxicity, driving new opportunities for assets that would otherwise be abandoned.
Ignota Labs employs a novel strategy to build a pipeline of high-value therapies. The company identifies promising drug candidates abandoned due to safety concerns – typically 80-90% of the way to success – and uses SAFEPATH to determine the underlying issues and develop solutions. This model reduces development timelines by years and costs by millions and offers multi-billion-dollar potential for each recovered therapy.
In just two years, Ignota Labs showed the power of its approach. The company successfully in-licensed its first asset, a first-in-class metabolic health drug with the potential to improve the lives of over 1.2 billion post-menopausal women. Utilizing SAFEPATH, Ignota Labs resolved safety concerns that halted the drug’s progress, validating its findings through rodent models.
Ignota Labs was launched by a multidisciplinary team with expertise across machine learning, drug discovery, and drug development and commercialisation. And CEO & Co-Founder Sam Windsor previously worked on DeepMind’s AlphaFold team and has a decade of experience in life sciences. Chief Scientific Officer Jordan Lane has advanced five assets to clinical development, and Chief Data Science Officer Layla Hosseini-Gerami is an expert on AI and cheminformatics.
The company also published a pre-print highlighting use of SAFEPATH to analyse hepatotoxicity mechanisms in erlotinib and gefitinib and have a peer-reviewed paper published in the Royal Society of Chemistry’s Digital Discovery journal.
KEY QUOTES:
“We’re thrilled to have the support of this leading investor syndicate in our mission to rescue promising yet struggling drugs with our technology. Traditional safety assessments reveal when something is wrong, but our platform goes a step further by identifying the exact molecular and biological issues to provide actionable insights to re-engineer and revive therapies. With this funding, we can expand our efforts to salvage distressed assets and accelerate the delivery of life-saving therapies to patients.”
- Sam Windsor, CEO and Co-Founder, Ignota Labs
“Ignota Labs is solving one of the most critical challenges in drug development, rescuing promising therapies that would otherwise be abandoned due to safety issues. Their SAFEPATH platform represents a groundbreaking approach, combining cutting-edge AI with deep scientific expertise to address the root causes of drug toxicity. We believe Ignota Labs has the ability to enable more drugs to make it to the clinic and get to the patients who need them.”
- Todd Kimmel, Founder and Managing Partner, Montage Ventures
“Ignota is redefining drug development and pioneering a new era of predictive and engineerable biology—where AI systematically de-risks therapeutic development by designing safer, more effective drugs with precision. Their approach shifts biopharmaceutical R&D from trial-and-error to a rational, data-driven process, enabling molecules to be precisely refined at scale to accelerate clinical development. I’m incredibly excited about their potential to transform AI-driven drug discovery and unlock massive value from previously failed assets to improve patient outcomes.”
- Krish Ramadurai, Partner at AIX Ventures
