Harmonic Discovery, a therapeutics company building an integrated computational and experimental platform for kinase drug discovery and targeted polypharmacology, announces its launch today with $8 million in seed funding. The round was led by Innovation Endeavors with participation from Fifty Years, Y Combinator, Boom Capital, Caffeinated Capital and select angel investors. Dr. Joel Dudley, PhD, Partner at Innovation Endeavors, joins as a new Board Member.
Many drugs exert their effect through multiple modes of action which is a well-established phenomenon known as polypharmacology. Yet, the pharmaceutical industry has historically focused on finding “magic bullets”, or drugs optimized to engage specific single targets. Harmonic Discovery’s fully integrated kinase drug discovery platform aims to challenge this paradigm.
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Co-founders Rayees Rahman, PhD, Jason Lee, MD, and Marcel Patek, PhD are building a machine learning-first infrastructure that integrates several aspects of kinase drug discovery. The company’s models learn from the topology of atoms and bonds that make up a kinase drug, to the three-dimensional ins and outs of kinase structure, all the way up to the dynamic cellular environments of disease driven by kinases. By spanning multiple disciplines, including systems biology, cheminformatics, medicinal chemistry, and machine learning, the company believes it can develop novel therapies across diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders.
“There is an enormous opportunity to create safer and more effective drugs. We passionately believe that our unified approach to kinase drug discovery will be the first step in unlocking completely new ways to treat diseases. We’re thrilled to have Joel and the team at Innovation Endeavors on board to help us embrace our vision for the future of therapeutics,” said Rayees Rahman, PhD, Harmonic Discovery‘s CEO and Co-Founder.
“The co-founders at Harmonic Discovery have exceptional and complementary expertise across machine learning, medicinal chemistry and biotechnology business development to address the untapped potential of kinase drugs. The strength of their computational platform and methodology is a breakthrough in the industry. Their machine learning models and computational approaches are extremely precise and have been validated experimentally,” said Joel Dudley, PhD and Partner at Innovation Endeavors. Dr. Dudley was previously the Chief Scientific Officer at Tempus and Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.