Flagship Pioneering conceives, creates, resources, and grows first-in-category ventures to transform human health and sustainability. The company accelerates Flagship Pioneering’s advances in biology, engineering, medicine, energy, and beyond. The firm harnesses science and entrepreneurialism to envision alternative futures, beginning with seemingly unreasonable propositions and navigating to transformational outcomes through an evolutionary methodology. Flagship Pioneering combines innovative capacity, entrepreneurial leadership, and professional capital management in a single enterprise that systematically produces first-in-category companies.

Flagship Pioneering

Founded in Geneva in 1805, Pictet is today one of Switzerland's largest private banks, with assets under management and custody totalling USD 321 billion (CHF 349 / EUR 229) at the end of June 2009.

Pictet Private Equity Investors S.A.

BlackRock is an investment management company that provides its services to a diverse range of clients, including institutions, intermediaries, foundations, and individual investors. The firm operates as a global asset manager, overseeing and advising on a wide array of investment portfolios. In addition to its role as an investment manager, BlackRock is also known for its technological innovations and solutions that support various aspects of the financial industry. The company's multifaceted approach encompasses investment management, financial technology, and serving a broad spectrum of clients in the financial ecosystem.

BlackRock

The Baupost Group is a Boston-based hedge fund investment manager. The investment firm was founded in 1982 by Harvard Professor William Poorvu and partners Howard Stevenson, Jordan Baruch, and Isaac Auerbach.

The Baupost Group

Kyowa Kirin, engages in the manufacture and sale of medical products and pharmaceuticals in the therapeutic areas of nephrology, oncology, and immunology in Japan. Its pharmaceutical products include GRAN, a protein that enables a quick recovery from neutropenia and reduces the risk of infection; NESP, an agent for correcting anemia; ESPO, a glycoprotein, which acts as an anemia-relieving treatment for dialysis patients; and CONIEL, a calcium antagonist agent for hypertension and angina pectoris. The company's pharmaceutical products also comprise REGPARA an agent for the treatment of secondary hyperparathyroidism; ALLELOCK/Patanol, which are used as medicine for patients with various types of allergies; and DEPAKENE/TOPINA, antiepileptic agents. It also offers a range of products, including amino acids, nucleic acids, vitamins, and sugars, which are used to produce pharmaceuticals, health foods, foods, cosmetics, and other products; plant growth regulators, feed additives, companion animal-related products, and aquaculture medicinal products; and various types of alcohol for use in alcoholic beverages. In addition, the company manufactures and sells industrial alcohols and solvents for automotive, electronics, and housing industries; performance materials that enable the production of raw materials for lubricants, higher alcohols, and polymeric materials used in various consumer goods; and a range of electronic materials for the information technology industry. Further, it provides seasonings, sweeteners, freeze-dried products, and bakery products and ingredients. The company was founded in 1885 and is headquartered in Tokyo, Japan. Kyowa Hakko Kirin Co., Ltd. is a subsidiary of Kirin Holdings Company, Limited.

Kyowa Kirin

Hanwha Impact Partners is an investment firm that invest in ecofriendly energy and businesses that leverage the convergence of technologies.

Hanwha Impact Partners

Cellarity

Cellarity is a therapeutics company that uses genomic technologies, data science, and AI to develop a new generation of therapies. Its platform digitizes the molecular information in cells to elucidate how they behave in health and disease. Cellarity is using its platform to design medicines targeting the full cellular and molecular complexity of the disease, enabling a quantum leap in the success rate and speed of drug discovery.

<div>Cellarity was founded by Flagship Pioneering, a venture capital firm that invests in the life sciences sector. By combining network biology, AI, and technology, Cellarity has created a drug discovery platform that develops drugs by studying and altering cell behavior. The company claims to be the first to pursue drug discovery based on understanding cell behavior, which aims to create medicine by targeting the full cellular and molecular complexity of diseases. The ability to do so should help the company significantly improve the success rate and speed of drug discovery. The startup claims that in just less than a year, it has been able to identify &ldquo;nearly a dozen&rdquo; lead drug candidates with in vivo proof-of-concept across multiple therapeutic areas.</div>

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

AI Drug Discovery

Cellarity Appoints Percy Carter, MBA, Ph.D., as Member of Board of Directors

<div>
 
 Cellarity was founded by Flagship Pioneering, a venture capital firm that invests in the life sciences sector. By combining network biology, AI, and technology, Cellarity has created a drug discovery platform that develops drugs by studying and altering cell behavior. The company claims to be the first to pursue drug discovery based on understanding cell behavior, which aims to create medicine by targeting the full cellular and molecular complexity of diseases. The ability to do so should help the company significantly improve the success rate and speed of drug discovery. The startup claims that in just less than a year, it has been able to identify &ldquo;nearly a dozen&rdquo; lead drug candidates with in vivo proof-of-concept across multiple therapeutic areas.
 
 
 As of March 2024, the company had four drug candidates in its internal pipeline which targets hematology and immunology diseases. &nbsp;
 
 
 Key customers and partnerships
 
 
 In 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/25240">
 January 2024
 </a>
 , the company partnered with Novo Nordisk to develop new treatment approaches for cardiometabolic diseases.
 
 
 Funding and financials
 
 
 In 
 <a href="https://sp-edge.com/updates/13505">
 October 2022
 </a>
 , the company raised USD 121 million in a Series C funding round led by Flagship Pioneering. The funds were expected to advance its drug discovery pipeline towards the clinic, further developing its platform, and growing its headcount.
 
</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

INCUMBENTS_PRESENT

PROMINENT_CATEGORY

<div>
 AI drug discovery firm Cellarity and Novo Nordisk are collaborating to develop treatment methods for cardiometabolic diseases, as part of a partnership between Novo Nordisk and Flagship Pioneering. Novo Nordisk will cover the R&amp;D expenses and Cellarity will receive up to USD 532 million in upfront payments, development and commercial milestones, in addition to tiered royalties on annual net sales.
 The collaboration will utilise Cellarity’s tech to discover new therapeutics against metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis disease progression and develop a small-molecule therapy.
</div>

Cellarity

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