Nvidia, Pfizer Back AI Drug Discovery Startup

Israeli startup CytoReason has secured $80 million in funding to accelerate the development of its AI-powered platform for disease modeling and drug discovery. 

Founded in 2016, the startup’s platform creates computational disease models for predictive therapeutics. Its AI-powered tool is designed to assist researchers looking for potential disease treatments.

Nvidia, Pfizer, OurCrowd and Thermo Fisher Scientific invested in the startup, which plans to use the funds to accelerate its growth.

CytoReason plans to invest in expanding the application of its computational models and grow its proprietary corpus of molecular and clinical data.

The startup is also looking to open an office in Cambridge, Massachusetts later this year.

“CytoReason is grateful for this infusion of new capital from industry technology powerhouses such as Nvidia, Pfizer and Thermo Fisher,” said David Harel, CytoReason’s co-founder and CEO.” The world understands that data alone is not enough and that the future of data-driven insights is in data modeling. CytoReason is at the forefront of this revolution in pharma research and development.”

Based in Tel Aviv, CytoReason built an AI-powered platform that extracts insights from data on human diseases to help pharma researchers make data-driven decisions.

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The company’s platform lets users uncover and compare potential therapeutic targets across multiple diseases. 

Using its pharmaceutical data, CytoReason's platform simulates human diseases at the cellular level to observe how potential treatments interact with the human body, enabling drugs to make their way to patients faster.

The startup has been working with Pfizer since 2019. Pfizer has been using CytoReason’s AI technology to aid in drug development programs.

Pfizer took a $20 million equity stake in the startup in 2022, securing the ability to license CytoReason’s platform and disease models as part of a deal worth $110 million.

“Our collaboration with CytoReason leverages its cutting-edge immunology multiomics platform to augment Pfizer’s own research and development capabilities and generate invaluable insights into new drug development pathways for patients,” said Mikael Dolsten, Pfizer’s chief scientific officer. “We’re pleased to see the company’s recent growth and look forward to our continued work together.”

The startup claims to work with six of the world’s top 10 pharma companies, including Pfizer. These companies utilize its platform to uncover treatments across various therapeutic areas such as inflammation, therapeutics and immunology.

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CytoReason leverages Nvidia’s computing and AI platforms to power its work. Kimberly Powell, Nvidia’s general manager for health care, said the startup achieved 10 times the acceleration for inference of its workloads using the company’s tech.

“Our continued collaboration with CytoReason will help enable more life sciences companies to benefit from CytoReason’s predictive clinical insights,” Powell said.

This story first appeared in IoT World Today's sister publication AI Business.