Israeli startup CytoReason, maker of a computation model to map and compare treatments, announced it secured $80 million in funding. 

Pfizer, OurCrowd, NVIDIA and Thermo Fisher Scientific participated in the round. 

WHAT IT DOES

CytoReason offers life sciences companies AI-enabled tools to gather data-driven and molecular-level insights to improve phase 2 success in clinical trials and optimize research and development. 

The company's model provides insights into datasets and literature, cell states, what drives disease progression over time, disease variation between patients, cell composition, cell interactions based on biological features in tissues and the effects of various treatments on disease. 

It will use the funds to expand the use of its models for different indications, grow its molecular and clinical data and open an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, later this year. 

"The rapid expansion of new technologies, like artificial intelligence, holds tremendous potential to help transform what is possible in human health," Mikael Dolsten, chief scientific officer and president of worldwide research, development and medical at Pfizer, said in a statement. 

"Our collaboration with CytoReason leverages its cutting-edge immunology multiomics platform to augment Pfizer’s own R&D capabilities and generate invaluable insights into new drug development pathways for patients. We’re pleased to see the company’s recent growth and look forward to our continued work together."

MARKET SNAPSHOT

CytoReason launched a collaboration with Pfizer in 2019 for the pharma giant to use its biological models in its drug development programs. 

The companies expanded their partnership in 2022, when Pfizer made a $20 million equity investment in CytoReason with the option to license its platform and disease models. According to the agreement, Pfizer would also fund additional projects. The deal was potentially worth up to $100 million over five years.

Other companies using AI for drug discovery include EvolutionaryScale, which uses biology-focused language models for drug discovery and therapeutic development. The company recently announced a partnership with Amazon Web Services and secured $142 million in seed funding. 

Google Research and Google DeepMind announced the development of an LLM for drug discovery and therapeutic development dubbed Tx-LLM, which utilizes the tech giant's generative AI technology, MedPaLM-2.

The LLM constructs the Therapeutics instruction Tuning (TxT) collection by interleaving free-text instructions with representations of small molecules.

TxT was then used to prompt and fine-tune Tx-LLM, the therapeutics large language model, to solve classification, regression and generation tasks involved with drug discovery and therapeutic development. 

Google said Tx-LLM shows promise as an end-to-end therapeutic development assistant.