Funding to Expand Potential of Simulation-first Drug Discovery

Turbine, a simulation-based drug discovery company has announced the closing of an institutional financing round; the seed fund will be used to redesign the failure-prone oncology drug discovery process into a series of rational steps facilitated by Turbine’s proprietary human cell model and simulation platform.

The company’s first institutional financing round of €3m will be used to expand the rational, simulation-based drug discovery workflow into every phase of drug discovery from research to lifecycle management.

Turbine was founded on the premise that a computational model of human cell biology would rationalize drug discovery the same way that computer-aided design revolutionized architecture. Based on a decade of research, Turbine’s biologists, bioinformaticians, data scientists, and AI engineers built the Simulated Cell. This platform is comprised of a dynamic computational model of the human cell and the underlying simulation technology to find the smartest route to novel targets, biomarkers, and combination therapies. The Simulated Cell explains the response of cancer cells to drugs on a mechanistic level. The 50-strong team has also recently kicked-off its initial simulation-based drug discovery program centred around DNA Damage Repair (DDR).

Designing life-saving therapies for cancer patients demands a vast amount of financial investment, time and brainpower from pharmaceutical companies, yet 96.6% of new anticancer drugs still fail during clinical trials. Many of these failures can be attributed to the incredible complexity of biology. Current lab methodologies provide only a limited understanding of how and why cancer cells respond to drugs. Turbine believes that narrowing down true novelty will be a success rate booster in every step drug discovery can fail today.