NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Computational drug discovery company TwoXar has raised $3.4 million in a seed financing round led by Andreessen Horowitz with support from existing investors CLI Ventures and the Stanford-StartX Fund.
Andreessen Horowitz's investment comes out of a new $200 million bio fund that the venture firm launched today to invest in companies that are developing software for use in the life science and healthcare domain. The firm also announced that Vijay Pande, previously a Stanford University professor of chemistry, structural biology, and computer science and director of Stanford biophysics' program, has joined the company as a general partner and will lead the newly established fund.
Founded in 2014, TwoXar offers the DUMA platform, which is a cloud-based drug-discovery platform that uses a proprietary patent-pending algorithm to find novel associations between drugs and diseases that can then be used to prioritize candidate compounds, run targeted searches, and identify novel drug candidates for further clinical testing. The platform works with gene expression, protein interaction, chemical structure, and clinical data among other data types.
The company said it will use the funds to expand its engineering and commercial teams and also to support new and existing partnerships focused on drug candidates for metabolic and neurological diseases. Its list of collaborators includes the University of Chicago, Michigan State University, and the Parkinson's Progression Markers Initiative.