NEW YORK – Israeli startup Promise Bio said Monday that it has closed an $8.3 million seed investment.
The company said it will use the funds to develop its proteomics-based computational platform for supporting drug development and guiding therapy in immune-mediated diseases.
The round was led by Awz Ventures with funding from AstraZeneca and Pfizer through AION Labs, a Rehovot, Israel-based organization that facilitates partnerships and collaborations between life science startups and the pharma industry.
Promise Bio aims to use AI to analyze protein posttranslational modification (PTM) data to aid drug research and therapy selection. The company's technology is based on work done by the lab of Promise Scientific Cofounder Yifat Merbl at the Weizmann Institute of Science that has enabled the development of a method for profiling dozens of PTMs from mass spectrometry data without requiring customized chemical enrichment.
"Determining the change in the protein level or relying on just blood count caused by a complex immune response is like looking at a black-and-white TV screen with poor resolution," Assaf Kacen, Promise Bio's cofounder and chief technology officer, said in a statement. "Our platform extracts modifications that occur to the proteins resulting from the disease; those specific changes inform us about aberrations in protein function or regulation. Interpreting it with machine-learning approaches is like watching a colored TV with an unparalleled high-resolution view of the underlying biology."
"Awz has deep confidence in Promise Bio's visionary leadership and distinctive strategy, which we believe are poised to set new standards in the field," Yaron Ashkenazi, founder and managing partner of Awz, said in a statement. "Our investment reflects our commitment to backing this transformative team with the potential to advance personalized medicine and make a lasting impact on patient outcomes."