Vevo Therapeutics – Improving Drug Dicovery with In Vivo Data and AI
Despite significant advances in the biotechnology industry over the past years, clinical trials continue to face a high rate of failure. This can be attributed to three key factors: (a) the poor predictive power of preclinical models, (b) their lack of generalizability in broader patient populations (patient heterogeneity), and (c) the limited understanding of a drug’s mechanism of action. Additionally, the industry’s gold-standard of disease modeling, patient-derived mouse models, are often not scalable as they require hundreds of individual models per drug.
We are thrilled to partner with Vevo Therapeutics as they tackle these challenges with Vevo’s Mosaic platform and next-gen AI models:
By starting drug discovery with in vivo screening, Vevo’s platform generates high-resolution data that better captures the complexity of the human body and enables a more accurate prediction of a drug’s safety and efficacy. This also allows the company to identify valuable targets that would be overlooked using traditional drug discovery workflows, which only incorporate in vivo models as a subsequent step in the process.
Furthermore, Vevo’s platform allows for the pooling of heterogeneous cell lines from tens to hundreds of patients in a single in vivo model and experiment, accounting for the diverse mosaic of genetic backgrounds across patients. By generating millions of data points on drug-induced changes in gene expression that capture patient diversity in drug response, Vevo’s platform enables a better understanding of a drug’s generalizability in diverse patient populations, as well as the identification of new patient sub-types.
Lastly, by aggregating and stratifying in vitro and in vivo drug-response, genetic, transcriptomic, and phenotypic data, Vevo can gain deep insights into the mechanism of action and resistance pathways of a drug compound. This provides Vevo with a powerful advantage in deciphering not only primary, but also secondary mechanisms of action.
Vevo’s platform allows for the discovery of tailored, safe and effective drugs with a higher likelihood of success in clinical trials. For patients, the platform could lead to the discovery of new, innovative treatment options that were not previously possible for a wide range of diseases.
Congratulations Nima Alidoust, Johnny Yu, Hani Goodarzi, and Kevan Shokat on the $12M Seed round! We are excited to partner with you on your missing to help improve how drugs are discovered.
