Cambridge, MA – April 18, 2018
ReviveMed Inc., today announced it has closed an oversubscribed seed round of $1.5 million to advance its artificial intelligence (AI)-driven platform that unlocks the value of metabolomics data for drug discovery and development. Rivas Capital led the round, which also included participation from several institutional investors including TechU, Team Builder Ventures, and WorldQuant Ventures.
“Metabolomics data provide a critical link between the activity of genes and proteins, and phenotypic behavior in normal and disease states,” said Dr. Leila Pirhaji, Founder and CEO of ReviveMed. “However, despite its potential, metabolomics has been greatly underutilized due to the difficulty of identifying a large number of metabolites in each patient. Our platform for the first time enables the rapid, high-throughput and cost-effective application of metabolic data to discover new disease mechanisms for drug discovery and, simultaneously metabolomic biomarkers to identify which patients stand to benefit by targeting the disease mechanism.”
Dr. Pirhaji noted that initial proof of concept studies with the platform was published in Nature Methods. These studies illuminated disease pathways, new effects of existing drugs, and novel therapeutic targets in Huntington’s disease.
In connection with the financing, Carlos Gonzalez will join the ReviveMed board of directors. Mr. Gonzalez is the founder of Rivas Capital, a private investment firm focused on breakthrough technology businesses. “ReviveMed has made great progress in demonstrating the enormous potential of its platform, through several initial collaborations with leading pharmaceutical companies, including a top three pharma company,” said Mr. Gonzalez. “The financing will allow the company to continue scaling the platform and begin building its internal drug discovery pipeline.”
ReviveMed’s initial internal discovery program is in metabolic diseases and focused specifically on non-alcohol fatty liver disease (NASH).
Prof. Ernest Fraenkel of MIT, co-founder and board member of ReviveMed, further commented, “ReviveMed’s combination of AI and metabolomics is unique, and has the potential to open entirely new therapeutic directions.”
About Metabolomics
Metabolomics is the large-scale study of small molecules like glucose or cholesterol produced by cellular activity. Metabolites are the closest link between cellular activity and what is observed in disease symptoms. Compared to genetic factors that indicate what may happen in a disease, metabolite levels reflect what is actually happening. In addition, metabolomics data can show the genetic and environmental interactions, further indicating the effects of environment, lifestyle, and the microbiome. Despite the great potential of metabolomics, it has been underutilized in drug discovery and development due to the difficulties of identifying a large number of metabolites for each patient.
About ReviveMed’s Platform
ReviveMed’s founders at MIT developed a pioneering AI platform to address the challenges of accessing metabolomics data. ReviveMed’s platform consists of a proprietary AI algorithm which utilizes a comprehensive knowledge-based graphical database of metabolites to understand their interactions with proteins and their associations with diseases. The platform enables fast, high-throughput, and inexpensive identification of metabolites, and translates these data into therapeutic insights. ReviveMed can specifically discover molecular mechanisms leading to a disease from tissues and biofluid metabolites. Using this platform ReviveMed has the potential to enable the discovery of drugs, and simultaneously find the biomarkers that identify exactly which patients will benefit from the drug.
About ReviveMed
ReviveMed is a pioneer in the intersection of artificial intelligence and metabolomics. Located in the heart of biotech innovation in Cambridge, ReviveMed uniquely overcomes the difficulties of identifying a large set of metabolites for each patient, based on technology developed at The Fraenkel Lab at MIT and published in Nature Methods. It further translates metabolomic data into novel therapeutic insights for drug and drug response biomarker discovery. Currently, ReviveMed is collaborating with tier-one pharmaceutical companies to support their drug discovery programs and in pursuing internal drug discovery, initially focused on metabolic diseases. Learn more at www.revive-med.com, and follow us on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn.