With more than $1 billion in funding, driven by Arch Venture Partners and Foresite Capital, the AI drug discovery business Xaira Therapeutics has made its debut in using computational methods that could revolutionize drug discovery.
While confirming the funding, Xaira’s CEO Marc Tessier-Lavigne, a former Stanford president and chief scientific officer at Genentech, said the company is ready to start developing drugs that were impossible to make without recent breakthroughs in AI.
Other investors in the San Francisco-based company include F-Prime, NEA, Sequoia Capital, Lux Capital, Lightspeed Venture Partners, Menlo Ventures, Two Sigma Ventures, the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy, Byers Capital, Rsquared, and SV Angel as per the report.
Newsng gathered that Arch’s investment in Xaira is the largest in the venture firm’s 39-year history.
Xaira stated that it intends to use AI in conjunction with superior product development, biological and clinical data gathering, and top-tier product development to advance an undisclosed number of “multiple” medication programmes.
The firm did not, however, specify its therapeutic areas or targets of interest.
Bob Nelsen, managing director of ARCH Venture Partners, emphasised that Xaira and its investors are prepared to take a long-term approach.
“You need billions of dollars to be a real drug company and also think AI. Both of those are expensive disciplines,” he said.
Tessier-Lavigne served as Genentech’s chief scientific officer before later becoming president of Rockefeller University and most recently, Stanford University.
“Witnessing how AI is impacting other industries and the considerable progress in applications of AI in biology, I believe we are poised for a revolution,” he noted in the statement.
“We are at the dawn of a new era in Drug Discovery powered by AI,” Hetu Kamisetty, PhD, formerly of Facebook parent company Meta and the Institute for Protein Design declared on LinkedIn.
“Excited to be working on this mission with an amazing team at Xaira Therapeutics!”
We earlier reported that Apple has acquired Datakalab, a French AI firm specializing in on-device processing, aligning with its commitment to enhance privacy and data security.
