With some 25 tiny technology companies in our portfolio, Harris & Harris Group, Inc.Â®, is one of the most active nanotechnology investors in the world. They have funded companies developing nanoscale-enabled solutions in solid state lighting, emerging memory devices, printable electronics, material science discovery and mass-manufacturing, organic-inorganic hybrids, next-generation semiconductor devices and equipment, thermoelectric, photovoltaic and battery technologies, as well as in various life-science applications of nano-structured materials.  They participate in venture capital syndicates in most of their investments, alongside top-tier venture capital firms as well as strategic (corporate) investors. Increasingly, Harris & Harris Group is a lead investor. They believe in the classical early stage venture capital model and disciplines and that most technology-based start-ups can use all the help they can get from the diversified experiences, RolodexesÂ®, complimentary business networks, technical expertise, up-to-date customer connections and financial resources that a syndicate of professional venture capital investors can provide.  Harris & Harris Group will invest at any stage prior to a company's initial public offering, and they will invest anywhere in the United States. Occasionally, they have also made private investments in publicly held companies (so-called ''PIPE'' investments). They have invested outside the United States, but rarely. Their current portfolio companies are distributed all across the country, plus one in Canada.  Harris & Harris Group is looking for scientific, technological, business and execution excellence. They are attracted to markets of significant size and back passionate entrepreneurs who want to change the world with their tiny technology-enabled products.  Proprietary, well-protected and highly differentiated technology is a prerequisite. But above all, they are eager to invest in companies with market-centric strategies that seek to define and dominate large product categories.

180 Degree Capital

Alexandria Venture Investments is a strategic venture capital arm of Alexandria Real Estate Equities. Alexandria Venture Investments provides long-term strategic investment capital to innovative life science and technology entities developing breakthrough technologies and therapies.  Leveraging their experience and in-depth understanding of the life science and technology industries, their long-term relationships with leading investors, and their world-class scientific advisory network, they  are uniquely positioned to fund seed-, early-, and growth-stage companies.

Alexandria

Morgan Noble is a group of partners that offer growth services to healthcare businesses.

Morgan Noble

New York Ventures is dedicated to encouraging innovation and fueling economic growth in communities across the State. This venture capital investment arm of Empire State Development is one of New York State's business resources and innovation investments, including the Governor's START-UP NY program, Innovation Hot Spots, the Regional Economic Development Councils, the Centers of Advanced Technology and Centers of Excellence networks, and the SUNY 2020 Initiative.

New York Ventures

Trancos Ventures is a venture capital firm invest in startup companies with a concentration on life science tools, therapeutics.

Trancos Ventures

OMX Ventures is investing at the convergence of biology and computing.

OMX Ventures

DEFTA Partners is a venture capital firm focusing on technology. They primarily make seed and first round investments in early stage information technology companies with global opportunities to accelerate growth.  DEFTA has offices and partners in the United States, Japan, Israel and the United Kingdom.  via: [DEFTA Partners](http://www.deftapartners.com)

DEFTA Partners

The Partnership Fund for New York City is the investment arm of the Partnership for New York City. It invests in NYC based ventures, both for-profit and non-profit, with an overall job creation priority.

Partnership Fund for New York City

Lifeforce Capital invests in digital health companies enabling new care delivery models or more efficient therapeutic development. Lifeforce Capital is headquartered in San Francisco, California.

Lifeforce Capital

Mérieux Equity Partners (“MxEP”) is a management company dedicated to venture, growth and LBO investments in the healthcare and nutrition sectors. MxEP actively supports entrepreneurs and industrial companies with differentiated products and services, by providing privileged access to its expertise and international network. MxEP currently manages more than €600m AUM and has recently launched a new vehicle MP3 of €350m dedicated to growth/LBO.

Mérieux Equity Partners

Tachyon Ventures invests in early-stage life sciences ventures at the forefront of medicine, biotech, and bioengineering. They seek scientific teams pursuing ambitious goals, backed by world-leading research (and secured IP) in the fields of immunotherapy, gene therapy / genetic engineering, organ engineering, and stem cell / regenerative medicine.

Tachyon Ventures

TARA Biosystems

Tara Biosystems provides predictive, in vitro human cardiac tissue models for use in drug discovery, safety assessment and translational medicine. Tara Biosystems offers a high-fidelity solution that is based on human stem cell-derived cardiac tissue matured to physiologically relevant adult-like levels and provides direct measures of cardiac functionality, including contractile force. The company is dedicated to pioneering predictive cardiac tissue models that enable the faster, safer, and more reliable development of new medicines.

<div>Tara Biosystems is a company that focuses on cardiac drug discovery. Its Biowire platform generates cardiac tissue that replicates the characteristics of the human heart (in-vitro biology). The company uses these tissues to help pharma companies test drugs, run simulations, and accurately identify cardiovascular complications without having to test on animals or actual humans. The platform can be used through all aspects of the drug discovery process, including target validation, compound optimizations, and preclinical assessments.</div>

Artificial intelligence is identifying and testing new therapies faster than ever.

AI Drug Discovery

Tara Biosystems

Valo Health nabs TARA Biosystems and its beating heart-on-a-chip

<div>
 
 Tara Biosystems is a company that focuses on cardiac drug discovery. Its Biowire platform generates cardiac tissue that replicates the characteristics of the human heart (in-vitro biology). The company uses these tissues to help pharma companies test drugs, run simulations, and accurately identify cardiovascular complications without having to test on animals or actual humans. The platform can be used through all aspects of the drug discovery process, including target validation, compound optimizations, and preclinical assessments.
 
 
 Tara Biosystems partnered with VantAI in July 2020 allowing the partnership to leverage Tara's in-vitro human biology models and VanAI's computational drug discovery capabilities to develop new therapies for cardiac diseases.
 
</div>

<div>
 
 HiberCell is a biotechnology company that develops novel therapies focused on oncology. It entered the AI drug discovery space when it acquired AI genomics analysis company Genuity Science (and its subsidiaries in Iceland and Ireland) in August 2021.&nbsp;
 
 
 Genuity Science&rsquo;s solutions include end-to-end therapeutic discovery and development services such as building custom disease datasets, discovering and prioritizing targets, identifying biomarkers, and optimizing clinical trials. Genuity Science leverages its AI-powered platform to manage, process, and analyze genomic data. HiberCell intends to use Genuity Science&rsquo;s AI/ML capabilities to advance its oncology pipeline of five programs, of which one has reached the Phase 2 clinical trial stage.
 
 
 As of March 2024, the company&rsquo;s pipeline included three drug candidates, namely: 1) HC-7366, targeting the general control nonderepressible 2 (GCN2) kinase as part of the integrated stress response (ISR) signaling pathway; 2) HC-5404, aimed at inhibiting the PKR-like endoplasmic reticulum kinase (PERK) involved in the unfolded protein response (UPR) signaling pathway; and 3) odetiglucan, a therapy targeting tumor-immune interactions within the tumor microenvironment​.&nbsp;
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 In December 2023, HiberCell and Merck &amp; Co partnered to conduct a Phase Ib trial to evaluate the combination therapy of belzutifan and HC-7366 for treating clear cell renal cell carcinoma. Further, in January 2021, the company partnered with Biodesix to develop an enzyme-linked immunosorbent assay as a companion diagnostic test.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In 
 <a href="https://hibercell.com/news/hibercell-closes-67-4-million-series-b-financing-and-secures-30-million-debt-facility-from-hercules-capital/">
 May 2021
 </a>
 , HiberCell completed a Series B financing round, raising USD 67.4 million, and secured an additional USD 30 million in debt financing from Hercules Capital. The funds were expected to be used for clinical advancement of its novel therapeutic candidates. 
 
</div>

HiberCell

<div>
 
 Arbor Biotechnologies specializes in gene editing to develop novel therapeutics for a variety of indications, starting with liver-related diseases. It operates an AI-powered biodiscovery platform to discover novel CRISPR enzymes, which are sequences of repeating genetic code. To do this, its platform deploys computational search techniques, genome sequencing, gene synthesis, and high-throughput screening. This can eventually be turned into drugs or even applied to agriculture and other industrial uses. In 2018, the company announced the discovery of Cas13d, a new type of gene editing enzyme that helps to alter RNA to treat genetic diseases.&nbsp;
 
 
 As of February 2024, the company had five internal drug discovery programs, of which one was in the IND-enabling stage. It also has multiple collaborative programs under development focused on oncology and various other therapeutic areas.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 The company has a long-standing partnership with Vertex Pharmaceuticals since
 <a href="https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20190103005194/en/Vertex-and-Arbor-Biotechnologies-Establish-Collaboration-to-Discover-Novel-Proteins-to-Advance-Discovery-of-Gene-Editing-Therapies">
 January 2019
 </a>
 , which focused on developing gene-editing treatments for cystic fibrosis and four other diseases. The alliance was further extended in 
 <a href="https://www.biospace.com/article/vertex-and-arbor-strike-a-1-2-billion-deal-for-gene-editing-programs/">
 August 2021
 </a>
 and 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/15741">
 January 2023
 </a>
 .&nbsp;
 
 
 Other partnerships included a collaboration with 
 <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/arbor-biotechnologies-announces-collaboration-with-ginkgo-bioworks-to-advance-the-discovery-and-development-of-precision-gene-editors-302011991.html">
 Ginkgo Bioworks
 </a>
 (December 2023) to leverage Ginkgo's R&amp;D services to further optimize Arbor's novel precision editors, a non-exclusive licensing agreement with 
 <a href="https://www.globenewswire.com/news-release/2022/02/08/2380680/0/en/EdiGene-and-Arbor-Biotechnologies-Announce-Worldwide-Non-exclusive-License-Agreement-to-Advance-Ex-Vivo-Engineered-Cell-Therapy-Programs.html">
 EdiGene
 </a>
 (February 2022) to leverage Arbor&rsquo;s platform for ex vivo oncology therapies, a strategic research and non-exclusive licensing agreement with 
 <a href="https://investors.tcr2.com/news-releases/news-release-details/tcr2-therapeutics-and-arbor-biotechnologies-establish">
 TCR2 Therapeutics
 </a>
 (January 2022) to develop allogeneic TRuC T-cell therapies using Arbor&rsquo;s CRISPR technology, and a license agreement with 
 <a href="https://www.lonza.com/news/2020-12-23-14-00">
 Lonza
 </a>
 (December 2020) to use Arbor&rsquo;s gene-editing technology for Lonza&rsquo;s bioproduction products and services.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In its latest Series B funding round in November 2021, which was led by Ally Bridge Group, TCG Crossover, and Temasek, Arbor Biotechnologies raised USD 215 million. The proceeds of the round were earmarked to fuel the company&rsquo;s clinical development pipeline.
 
</div>

Arbor Biotechnologies

Based in the UK, Arctoris provides an automated drug discovery platform, offering fully validated research and development (R&amp;D) processes under an Experiments-as-a-Service model. The company works with biotechnology companies, AI drug discovery companies, pharma and academic institutions enabling these institutions to run experiments in Arctoris’s platform and provides on-demand access to a broad scale of datasets for AI drug discovery companies to train their algorithms.

Arctoris

<div>
 
 Frontier Medicines leverages AI/ML technologies to develop treatments for cancer-causing proteins that are dismissed by traditional pharma companies as undruggable.&nbsp;
 
 
 The company has a proprietary chemoproteomic platform which entails an approach based on the interaction of small-molecule compounds and proteins to screen a large number of targets and combine them with a protein database that contains more than 150,000 novel binding pockets (hotspots). This enables it to access 90% of the human proteome that were not previously targeted due to lack of hotspots. The platform&rsquo;s AI/ML engine incorporates a library of diverse compounds, a hotspot map that serves as the starting point for understanding the druggability of a potential therapeutic target, and lead design and generation.&nbsp;
 
 
 The company focuses on oncology and immunology target and, as of February 2024, it had five wholly-owned therapeutic programs and three AbbVie-partnered programs in its pipeline. All programs were in their discovery stage, except the company&rsquo;s lead candidate, FMC-376 (activated and inactivated forms), focused on treating different cancer types, including non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC), colorectal carcinoma (CRC), and pancreatic ductal adenocarcinoma (PDAC), which is in the IND-enabling stage.
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 The company entered a USD 100 million partnership with 
 <a href="https://news.abbvie.com/2020-12-02-AbbVie-and-Frontier-Medicines-Establish-Global-Partnership-to-Discover-and-Develop-Novel-Therapies-and-E3-Degraders-Against-Difficult-to-Drug-Targets">
 AbbVie
 </a>
 In December 2020 to develop small-molecule therapeutics against hard-to-drug protein targets including around 600 E3 ligases (the enzymes that drive the ubiquitination and degradation of proteins.&nbsp;
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In July 2021, the company raised USD 88.5 million in a 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/4347">
 Series B
 </a>
 funding round co-led by Woodline Partners LP and RA Capital Management, with equal participation from Deerfield Management Company. The proceeds were earmarked for advancing the company&rsquo;s drug pipeline and expanding operations in Boston, where its new facility was to complement the company&rsquo;s headquarters in California. 
 
</div>

Frontier Medicines

<div>
 
 Verge Genomics is a biotechnology company engaged in developing therapeutics for neurological diseases using human genomics and AI to accelerate drug discovery. The main target areas are Amyotrophic Lateral Sclerosis (ALS), Parkinson&rsquo;s Disease (PD), and Frontotemporal Dementia (FTD).&nbsp;
 
 
 It has built a proprietary all-human platform (unlike standard clinical trials that rely on animal data), called CONVERGE, that uses data sets from brain tissue samples of deceased patients with ALS and PD. While most drugs target only one gene at a time, the company claims its technology can identify hundreds of genes that cause disease and develop drugs that target all the genes at the same time. The company uses AI technology to optimize the drug discovery process as a whole.
 
 
 As of March 2024, Verge had one drug candidate in the clinical stage (Phase I) and 10 drug candidates in the discovery stage.&nbsp;
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 The company has partnerships with various tissue banks (such as Harvard University and University of Miami Miller School of Medicine) and several educational institutes and foundations (such as Target ALS, Answer ALS) that enabled its drug discovery platform.&nbsp;
 
 
 In addition, the company&rsquo;s customers include several pharmaceutical companies, such as 1) 
 <a href="https://www.vergegenomics.com/news-blog/verge-genomics-announces-research-collaboration-with-the-sheffield-institute-for-translational-neuroscience">
 Sheffield Institute for Translational Neuroscience (SITraN)
 </a>
 to accelerate the validation of novel drug targets and screening of drug compounds for Parkinson's disease (February 2021), 2) 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/4146">
 Eli Lilly
 </a>
 to research and develop novel therapies to treat ALS (July 2021), 3) 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/21707">
 Alexion
 </a>
 to identify novel drug targets for rare neurodegenerative and neuromuscular diseases (September 2023), and 4) 
 <a href="https://www.vergegenomics.com/news-blog/verge-genomics-and-the-pritzker-neuropsychiatric-disorders-research-consortium-form-cutting-edge-schizophrenia-research-collaboration">
 Pritzker Neuropsychiatric Disorders Research Consortium
 </a>
 to analyze data from schizophrenic patient&rsquo;s brain tissue with Verge&rsquo;s technology (October 2023).
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In December 2021, Verge raised USD 98 million in an oversubscribed 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/7426">
 Series A
 </a>
 funding round led by BlackRock. The funds were used to scale up its pre-clinical and clinical candidate programs in the pipeline and enhance its lead therapeutics through clinical testing. 
 
</div>

Verge Genomics

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) companies providing their ML platform to other pharma companies for drug discovery services such as target selection, validation and lead optimization.

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) companies providing their ML platform to other pharma companies to design and run preclinical experiments.

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) companies providing their ML platform to other pharma companies to identify biomarkers (measurable biological signs used to determine disease progression) and predict drug response. 

SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) companies aggregating and analyzing biomedical data with the help of AI to generate insights across the drug development pipeline.

Biotechnology companies that have integrated AI as a core component of their in-house drug development process. They typically have a few in-house drug development programs, and also collaborate with pharma companies to develop certain drugs.

Companies leverage GenAI to support drug discovery through accelerated drug designing

Companies offer AI/ML-based SaaS products to accelerate the discovery and development of novel therapeutics

Offers AI/ML-based solutions to accelerate drug discovery and development

Tara Biosystems

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