STAT+: Flatiron Health veterans raise $25 million for AI tool to forecast drug toxicity
Flatiron Health veterans have raised $25 million for an AI tool to forecast drug toxicity.
In January, San Francisco’s Union Square was bustling with hordes of drug developers and investors, pounding the pavement on their way from meeting to meeting. But Rohan Ganesh, an investor at the VC firm Obvious Ventures, wasn’t among them. He only agreed to hear one company’s pitch during this year’s J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference.
The meeting was with a startup created by Flatiron Health veterans Josh Haimson and Ben Birnbaum. The duo had built the first team at Flatiron focused on machine learning, and, a few years after pharmaceutical giant Roche snapped up the company for $1.9 billion, they launched their own company.
Their new venture, Inductive Bio, has created an artificial intelligence tool that biotechs can use to design and model different versions of a small-molecule drug, sussing out what variation might cause drug toxicity or be metabolized too quickly.
