A new drug development company with a presence in the Triangle is using advanced machine learning and artificial intelligence to make precision medicines for patient populations of all sizes.
Creyon Bio is a pre-clinical stage company that launched Tuesday with offices in both San Diego and Research Triangle Park. The startup launched having raised more than $40 million in seed and series A financing that was led by DCVC Bio and Lux Capital and included investments from Casdin Capital, Alexandria Venture Investments and BioBrit.
The investment will support the company in building out its drug development platform and double the size of its 20-person team split between its two offices by the end of the year.
The company was formed in the fall of 2019 by co-founders Chris Hart and Swagatam Mukhopadhyay, who serve as Creyon's CEO and chief scientific officer, respectively. Hart said the idea for the company is driven by the desire to speed up and reduce the cost of the drug development process.
Scientists' understanding of disease biology continues to increase, but the drug development industry is failing to capitalize on this progress, Hart said.
"The biggest problem with developing drugs is that it takes too long and it's too expensive," Hart said. "At the end of the day, being faster and cheaper is, I think, an admirable goal that we should strive for."
To reach this goal, Creyon plans to use its purpose-built datasets and machine learning to develop models to engineer oligonucleotide-based medicines with broad applicability. Creyon believes its process is "orders-of-magnitude" more efficient than the typical trial-and-error screening process utilized in drug development
Through this process, the company says it aims to develop drugs for patient populations from as small as one to the millions. This means developing therapeutics that target both rare diseases and more common conditions.
The company isn't disclosing its specific therapeutic targets yet. Rather, Creyon is focusing on building a platform that will allow it to engineer these molecules so that they are safe and effective. This process could take up to 18 to 24 months, but after this platform is in, the company will be able to quickly advance drug candidates in clinical trials and expand its pipeline.
"One of the things that excites us is the generality," Hart said. "It's not uniquely use for one specific area. The sky's the limit in terms of what you can do."