In 2021, with $180 million of Series C funding and expansion ideas, Toronto-founded Deep Genomics set its sights on Boston. Three years later, the company opened its expansion campus in Cambridge and announced new additions to its C-Suite.
Deep Genomics was founded by Dr. Brendan Frey, now the company's CIO. Deep Genomics is behind what it says is the first AI model for decoding RNA biology and developing therapeutics, called BigRNA.
Frey said that when he was thinking about places to plant the flag for the next chapter of Deep Genomics, Boston was the obvious choice.
The expansion is housed at One Canal by Breakthrough in Cambridge. It shares 35,000 square-feet of the 105,000-square-foot space with two other biotech companies, Larkspur Biosciences and Incendia Therapeutics.
Construction on the one-time Cambridge office property near Lechmere Station started in August 2022.
According to Frey, Deep Genomics is looking to tap into the “best-in-class talent the city has to offer,” recruiting Boston residents for open company positions. The main priority for Deep Genomics is finding a senior machine learning operations engineer and senior machine learning scientist.
The company currently has 99 employees, with an additional 16 based in the United States, mainly near the Cambridge facility.
Using the Toronto-to-Boston connection aligns with Deep Genomic's mission of interdisciplinary collaboration between medical science experts, life science experts, and technical engineers, Frey said.
“We have fostered a unique, cross-functional approach and have weaved cross-disciplinary collaboration into the fabric of our business,” he said. “This expansion is a reflection of that: We’ve combined wet lab and machine learning expertise to expedite the future of pharma R&D.”
In addition to opening the new expansion, Deep Genomics is also growing its executive leadership by adding four new members to its team. Joining the team are:
- Radu Dobrin, former senior vice president of translational sciences at Pathos AI, who will be the new chief technology officer and spearhead advancements in Deep Genomics' AI foundation platform;
- Joel Shor, with a background in software engineering with Alphabet's Verily Life Sciences, who will be the new vice president and head of machine learning and focus on advancing the company's AI and machine learning capabilities;
- Greg Hoffman, the former vice president of discovery and platform at Arbor Biotechnologies, who will be the new chief scientific officer; and
- Clive Bertram, former chief commercial officer at Obs Eva who is the chief business officer.
