What causes diseases? In most cases, altered cellular behaviors.
In an attempt to steer drug discovery and development to target cell behavior, Flagship Pioneering, the Cambridge-based VC firm focused on life sciences, has created a company designed to do just that. Cellarity exited from stealth on Tuesday.
Founded in 2017 in Flagship Labs, Cellarity claims to be the "first of its kind" therapeutics company to harness single-cell technologies and machine learning to identify and understand the "network state" of a cell, which defines cell behavior.
Flagship's thinking? Cells are dynamic systems that display a multitude of behaviors. Many diseases are the results of those behaviors in an altered state.
"Cellarity was founded on the premise that drug discovery has been focused on finding single smoking gun," said Cellarity’s founding CEO and Flagship Pioneering partner Avak Kahvejian. "The drug discovery process has become inefficient; the number of people working in drug discovery has gone up, but the number of drugs approved hasn't changed much."
Cellarity's approach begins with researchers quantitatively characterizing changes in cellular behaviors for a single given disease. Then, those researchers can work on drugs that course-correct those behaviors, ultimately treating the disease and bringing the patient back to health. By using artificial intelligence and machine learning, the company believes it can dramatically increase the success rate and speed of drug discovery.
"We allow the complexity of biology to drive the decision," Kahvejian said. "We can study the disease at the cellular level. A cell is what divides and unifies—why not study biology at cells, instead of protein?"
The company's founding team includes Cristina Rondinone, former senior vice president and head of cardiovascular, renal and metabolic diseases at MedImmune-AstraZeneca; Milind Kamkolkar, former chief data officer at Sanofi; and Chad Nusbaum, who founded and led the Broad Technology Labs and was co-director of the Broad Institute's Genome Sequencing and Analysis Program.
Cellarity's platform integrates the physical lab and its digital arm, Cellarium. The platform maps biological connections to AI-generated cell behavior screening to rapidly identify and explore new therapeutic hypotheses. The data helps generate a map of behaviors happening across the body and translate it from animal models to human models.
"We built a tech platform to understand cell behavior and infer which behavior we want to encourage and discourage," Kahvejian said. "It's a different way of looking at drug discovery."
Kahvejian clarified that the fast-track approach means the company can accelerate the ability to determine success before a drug goes to the clinical trial stage.
The therapeutics startup expects to work on diseases across the spectrum including but not limited to inflammation, neurological, oncological and metabolic diseases.
Located at 100 Technology Square in Kendall Square, Cellarity operates with $50 million capital funded by Flagship Pioneering but will open up its Series B round to outside investors in the future. The company has a full-time staff of 40 employees and is hiring for roles in drug discovery, decision intelligence and technology.
Its board of directors includes co-founder Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering; Avak Kahvejian, Ph.D.; Cristina Rondinone, Ph.D.; Carl Decicco, Ph.D., Chief Scientific Officer, Foghorn Therapeutics; Marcello Damiani, Chief Digital and Operational Excellence Officer, Moderna Therapeutics; and James J. Collins, Ph.D., Academic Co-Founder and Termeer Professor of Bioengineering in the Department of Biological Engineering and Institute for Medical Engineering & Science, MIT.
