IsraelAIStartupsCytoReasonrecently announced the completion of an $80 millionFinancing, with investors including industry giants such as Nvidia, Pfizer, OurCrowd and Thermo Fisher Scientific. The company plans to use the funding to accelerate its disease modeling and drug discovery for theAI platform development.
CytoReason was founded in 2016 and is based in Tel Aviv. The company has developed an AI platform that extracts insights from human disease data to create computational disease models for predictive therapies, assisting pharmaceutical researchers in making data-driven decisions. Its core technology simulates human diseases at the cellular level and observes how potential treatments interact with the human body, with the aim of acceleratingdrug developmentProcess.
David Harel, the company's co-founder and CEO, said, "The world understands that data alone is not enough, and that the future of data-driven insights lies in data modeling.CytoReason is at the forefront of the pharmaceutical R&D revolution."
Following this round of funding, CytoReason plans to expand the application of its computational models, add proprietary molecular and clinical databases, and open a new office in Cambridge, Massachusetts, later this year.
Notably, CytoReason has had a close working relationship with Pfizer since 2019.2022 Pfizer had acquired an equity stake in CytoReason for $20 million as part of a $110 million deal that secured access to CytoReason's platform and disease models. Pfizer's Chief Scientific Officer Mikael Dolsten said that the collaboration with CytoReason enhances Pfizer's R&D capabilities and provides valuable insights into the development of new medicines for patients.
In addition to Pfizer, CytoReason claims to have partnerships with six of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies. These companies use their platforms to find potential treatments in areas such as inflammation, therapeutics and immunology.
On the technical support side, CytoReason leverages Nvidia's compute and AI platforms to support its work, and Kimberly Powell, general manager of healthcare at Nvidia, reveals that CytoReason leverages Nvidia technology to increase workload inference speeds by a factor of 10.
CytoReason's successful funding and rapid growth highlights the huge potential of AI technology in the pharmaceutical industry. With more pharma giants and technology companies on board, AI-driven drug development is expected to accelerate the discovery of new therapies and bring more therapeutic hope to patients.