Today we are unveiling Transcripta Bio.
After working tirelessly for the last two years and completing more than 200 million experiments in our labs, we are opening the aperture of drug discovery to impact countless patients and lives.
We have already seen rapid proof of our platform from the early results across a number of rare diseases for which there are no current treatments. This will remain an important area of focus for us. However, there is so much more that we can do — hence our company’s new name.
At Transcripta, we are dedicated to high certainty drug discovery. By focusing on diseases where the causality is unequivocally established by human genetics, we’re leveraging the universe of small molecules that has consistently led to successful drugs and using technology at scale to discover new therapies for many diseases all at once. We also believe that the transcriptome holds immense potential for innovative discovery, and thus it is the cornerstone of our platform focus. Not only is the transcriptome the Rosetta Stone that describes a given cell state under healthy or disease settings, but it is also a gateway to characterize the fundamental basis of drug action and to discover new medicines.
We continue to develop the premier Drug-Gene Atlas in our high throughput lab that maps molecular structure and drug action to the whole cell transcriptome, revealing therapeutic candidates that rebalance gene expression to treat disease. Those “wet lab” results are also fed into our proprietary artificial intelligence model, Conductor AI, to predict new drugs that move gene expression as appropriate. By mapping structure to function, we are learning the essential “chemistry rules” to tune gene expression. From the machine learning models we have trained on thousands of genes, we are virtually screening billions of compounds for disease-modifying ability while minimizing off-target effects. In essence, we are building a closed-loop drug machine.
There has been so much support for Transcripta given our strong progress that we received pre-emptive interest from investors in raising a capital round. Given this, we just closed a $10 million round from current investors, including JAZZ Venture Partners and BlueYard Capital, as well as participation from family offices with personal interest and excitement about the promise of our platform. This capital will allow us to continue to accelerate and scale our work.
In this next chapter, we are also partnering with leading biopharma and tech companies, research centers, and patient foundations to uncover and advance new opportunities. As we chart a faster and broader path in drug discovery to create better lives for people around the world, we hope you’ll join us on this journey.
Chris Moxham, PhD Co-founder, CEO, Chief Scientific Officer