NEW YORK (GenomeWeb) – Deep Knowledge Ventures and Insilico Medicine today announced they have completed a milestone-based convertible bridge note agreement.
The agreement is for an $800,000 convertible loan from Hong Kong-based Deep Knowledge, leading to a next funding round of at least $4 million, conditional on Insilico achieving certain R&D and corporate development milestones. They include the validation of Insilico's drug repurposing capabilities and the establishment by Baltimore-based Insilico of an office in Basel, Switzerland, the partners said.
The next funding round would be led by a large, unnamed European venture capital firm and include Deep Knowledge. Insilico would need to demonstrate that it can repurpose one or more drugs using retrospective data in a double-blind validation experiment supervised by an impartial pharmaceutical company. Additionally, the bioinformatics firm would need to demonstrate that it can efficiently compare gene expression data produced by different microarray and next-generation sequencing companies.
Depending on how well Insilico achieves those milestones, it and its investors would decide on the size of the next investment round and the valuation of the company, "which could be in hundreds of millions of dollars," the partners said.
Dmitry Daminsky, senior partner at Deep Knowledge, said in a statement that while preliminary estimates are that Insilico could be a billion dollar business, "we don't want overwhelmingly positive emotions to prevail over logic." As a result, the VC firm will make a "small targeted investment that will enable the company to get their capabilities validated by third parties and to submit the vital papers demonstrating the performance of their drug repurposing algorithms."
He added that a Basel office for Insilico would allow it to keep in closer contact with its pharmaceutical partners.