Genesis raises $200m for AI drug discovery engine

Investor interest in artificial intelligence-powered drug discovery shows little signs of wearing off, as start-up Genesis Therapeutics rakes in an impressive $200 million in an oversubscribed Series B.

The latest round takes the total raised by Burlingame, California-based Genesis to $280 million and will be used to transition to a clinical-stage drug developer, according to the company. Its first round brought in $52 million in 2020.

Genesis was set up around a physics-based AI platform – called Genesis Exploration of Molecular Space (GEMS) – that applies generative and predictive AI technology to the design and generation of new drug candidates.

The platform is derived from PotentialNet, a deep neural network for molecular property prediction that Genesis' co-founder and chief executive, Evan Feinberg, invented in Stanford University's acclaimed Pande lab, whose founder Vijay Pande is general partner at a16z Bio + Health.

The company says it has taken GEMS forwards with a step-change improvement in its functionality, predicting more than 20 ADMET (absorption, distribution, metabolism, excretion, and toxicity) properties to help design molecules with a much greater chance of working as expected in clinical trials.

"AI presents a potent opportunity to revolutionise the drug discovery process, which frequently struggles to produce viable drug candidates against targets that are biologically well-validated, but considered undruggable due to highly challenging chemistry," commented Feinberg.

"This funding comes as Genesis is approaching an inflection point, with the first of our AI-enabled drug candidates entering the clinic," he added. So far, the targets of its in-house pipeline have not yet been revealed.

The start-up has already attracted a couple of big pharma partners in Roche's Genentech unit – which came on board in 2020 in a deal with undisclosed terms – and Eli Lilly, which paid $20 million upfront to use GEMS to discover novel therapies for up to five targets across multiple therapeutic categories in a deal with a top value of up to $670 million.

Genesis said that the new funding would allow it to expand its pipeline with "new programmes for underserved patient populations" and help it to make progress against "challenging and previously undruggable targets."

The second round was co-led by returning investor a16z Bio + Health and an unnamed life sciences investor, and supported by new investors including the venture capital arm of NVIDIA, Fidelity Management, and BlackRock.

It follows a string of other financings for companies applying AI to drug discovery in recent months, including a $95 million Series D for BenchSci, a €30 million round for French start-up Aqemia, and a $60 million Series B for Causaly.

Image by Julien Tromeur from Pixabay.