- Enabled drug discovery company X-37 announced it closed $14.5 million in Series A funding led by DCVC Bio
X-37 — an AI-enabled drug discovery company — announced it has closed $14.5 million in Series A funding. This round of funding was led by DCVC Bio and was joined by Alpha Intelligence Capital and Hemi Ventures. And the Series A round of funding will be used to expand the number of drug development programs at X-37 and to advance identified drug leads through laboratory and preclinical testing with the goal of starting human clinical trials by 2022.
X-37’s development programs encompass novel therapeutics that are modulating important drug targets to address unmet clinical needs, including ZAP-70 for autoimmune disease, PIM3 and SHP2 for cancer, and Factor XIIa for anticoagulation.
“We are thrilled with the progress we have made to date and we are looking forward to moving a set of important new drugs into development,” said David Collier, M.D., CEO and cofounder of X-37. “With this financing, we have the ability to progress multiple discovery and development programs. Our investors have been a huge help in the genesis of X-37, and we look forward to working closely with them going forward.”
X-37 was co-founded by Atomwise and a team of experienced pharmaceutical developers from Velocity Pharmaceutical Development. And in addition to the above development programs, the team at X-37 will identify more high-value drug targets, generate novel drug leads against these targets using Atomwise’s AI platform for structure-based drug design, and develop each of these drug programs to a medically-relevant inflection point — where it can be acquired by or partnered with a major pharmaceutical company to be brought to market. X-37 launched its operations in 2018 and has already generated promising novel hit molecules against several targets of high interest to the pharmaceutical industry.
“X-37 represents an opportunity to bring new drugs to market very quickly, for challenging targets that have repeatedly stumped pharma and are in dire need of advancement,” added Abraham Heifets, CEO and Founder of Atomwise, Inc. “We’re thrilled to work alongside industry veterans who have a track record of efficiently delivering drug after drug for the past 25 years.”
In conjunction with the funding, Kiersten Stead and Antoine Blondeau of Alpha Intelligence Capital has joined the Board of Directors of X-37. And the founding leadership team of X-37 is comprised of industry veterans like David Collier, M.D., Matthew Kerby, Ph.D., PE, James Larrick, M.D., Ph.D., Andrew Perlman, M.D., Ph.D., Anie Roche, J.D., Ph.D., and Edward Schnipper, M.D. — who together have brought 17 therapies to the market addressing an even greater number of indications.
“We are very pleased to be investors in X-37,” explained Kiersten Stead of DCVC Bio. “We have watched with great excitement as Atomwise has refined its deep neural network and chemistry expertise. We identified the team of drug developers at Velocity Pharmaceutical Development as ideal partners for Atomwise because of their experience in target selection and development of drug leads beyond the initial discovery stage. The progress of the combined teams at X-37 has been superb.”
