INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
the goal of ReviveMed, a new biotech startup out of MIT that just raised $1.5 million in seed funding.Around the turn of the century,
genomics was the big thing
Then, as the power to investigate complex biological processes improved, proteomics became the next frontier
We may have moved on again, this time to the yet more complex field of metabolomics, which is where ReviveMed comes in.Leila Pirhaji,
The problem she and her colleagues saw was the immense complexity of interactions between proteins, which are encoded in DNA and RNA, and
metabolites, a class of biomolecules with even greater variety
Hidden in these innumerable interactions somewhere are clues to how and why biological processes are going wrong, and perhaps how to address
DNA and RNA are easy to measure, but metabolites have tremendous diversity in mass
of testing have made metabolomics difficult to study
end she founded ReviveMed with her PhD advisor, Ernest Fraenkel, and shortly afterwards was joined by data scientist Demarcus Briers and
biotech veteran Richard Howell.Pharmaceutical companies and research organizations already have a mess of metabolites masses, known
interactions, suspected but unproven effects and disease states and outcomes
Plenty of experimentation is done, but the results are frustratingly vague owing to the inability to be sure about the metabolites
worth of spreadsheets and charts, either
an archive somewhere, gathering dust
in a presentation in March), they developed a model to evaluate and characterize everything in it, producing the kind of insights machine
biomolecules or processes that could be affected by drugs) and existing drugs that may affect those targets.The secret sauce, or one
ingredient anyway, is the ability to distinguish metabolites with similar masses (sugars or fats with different molecular configurations but
the same number and type of atoms, for instance) and correlate those metabolites with both drug and protein effects and disease outcomes
The metabolome fills in the missing piece between disease and drug without any tests establishing it directly.At that point the drug will,
of course, require real-world testing
But although ReviveMed does do some verification on its own, this is when the company would hand back the results to its clients,
pharmaceutical companies, which then take the drug and its new effect to market.In effect, the business model is offering a low-cost,
high-reward RD as a service to pharma, which can hand over reams of data it has no particular use for, potentially resulting in practical
applications for drugs that already have millions invested in their testing and manufacture
a new, powerful way to check for such things with little in the way of new investment.This is the kind of web of molecules and effects that
chance that existing drugs affect them
The first target is fatty liver disease, which affects millions, causing great suffering and cost
did at MIT is available for anyone to access (it was published in Nature Methods, in case you were wondering).But compared with genomics and
A research hospital looking to collaborate and share data while sharing any results publicly or as shared intellectual property, for
instance, would not be a situation where a lot of cash would change hands
In many cases, however, ReviveMed will aim to be a part of any intellectual property it contributes to
And of course the data provided by the clients goes into the model and improves it, which is its own form of payment
So you can see that negotiations might get complicated
But the company already has several revenue-generating pilots in place, so even at this early stage those complications are far from
This should allow them to hire the engineers and data scientists they need and expand in other practical ways
Placing well in a recent Google machine learning competition got them $200,000 worth of cloud computing credit, so that should keep them
It may prove to be a powerful example of data-driven biotech as lucrative as it is beneficial
