Deep Knowledge Ventures and Insilico Medicine signed a milestone-based convertible bridge note agreement during the recent JP Morgan conference in San Francisco, to support Insilico’s research into drug repurposing to fight aging
Today Deep Knowledge Ventures, a
Hong Kong-based venture fund specializing in early and growth stage
investments in Big Data and Life Sciences industries, announced the
completion and execution of a milestone-based convertible bridge note
agreement with Baltimore-based Insilico Medicine, Inc. The agreement
was signed during the JP Morgan conference in San Francisco in
mid-January and executed today. According to the terms of the
agreement, Deep Knowledge Ventures will provide an $800 thousand
convertible loan leading to at least $4 million in the next round of
funding. This is conditional on Insilico Medicine achieving certain
milestones in R&D and corporate development, including the
validation of its drug repurposing capabilities and the establishment
of a company office in Basel, Switzerland.
“Insilico Medicine is one of our flagship early investments that
demonstrated phenomenal growth and research output over the past year.
So we are ready to take the company to the next level,” said Dmitry
Kaminsky, senior partner of Deep Knowledge Ventures. “While early
engagements with large pharmaceutical companies indicate that Insilico’s
technology is likely to result in a billion dollar business, we don’t
want overwhelmingly positive emotions to prevail over logic. So we have
agreed to 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. We also recognize Insilico’s need to have
physical presence in Basel so they can keep closer contact with their
Big Pharma partners with local support and management expertise.”
Deep Knowledge Ventures showcased Insilico Medicine along with its
other portfolio companies during the JPMorgan conference in San
Francisco in January and attracted significant interest from the
various investor groups. In addition, on January 28th Insilico received
the “Most Promising Company in Healthtech/IT” award at the PMWC2015
congress in Palo Alto, and was selected for the finals of the NVIDIA
GPU Technology Challenge out of more than 150 technology companies.
For its next round of funding, which will be led by a large European
venture capital firm and will include Deep Knowledge Ventures, Insilico
Medicine must meet a number of milestones. First, Insilico must
demonstrate its ability to conclusively repurpose one or more drugs
using retrospective data in a double-blind validation experiment
supervised by an impartial pharmaceutical company. Second, the company
must also demonstrate its ability to efficiently compare gene expression
data produced by different microarray and NGS platforms. Depending on
the outcome of the independent validation, the company and its
investors will decide on the size of the next round and the valuation
of the company, which could be in the hundreds of millions of dollars.
“Our approach to aging research is built on a solid, sustainable
business model designed to generate unique data, build exciting new
products, incubate businesses and partner with top scientists while
keeping the company afloat and ensuring organic growth,” said Alex
Zhavoronkov, PhD, CEO of Insilico Medicine, Inc. “We are religiously
dedicated to solving aging and delivering practical solutions within the
next two years, but we want to start by helping pharmaceutical
companies revive their pipelines and use our technology to improve
R&D performance. Over the past two years we have managed to achieve
a lot with very little, growing the global team to over thirty people
while putting in the overtime to build a sustainable platform, where
risk is minimized. Now we are at a point where we can confidently
accept outside investment to expand our global operations and we thank
Deep Knowledge Ventures and their partners for their support.”
About Deep Knowledge Ventures
Deep Knowledge Ventures is a Hong Kong-based venture fund management
company focused on deploying machine learning to accelerate progress in
high-impact fields. DKV’s investment portfolio spans biotechnology,
regenerative medicine, oncology, drug discovery, bioinformatics and
personalized medicine. For more information, please visit http://www.deepknowledgeventures.com
Insilico Medicine, Inc. is a Baltimore-based company utilizing advances
in genomics and big data analysis for in silico drug discovery and
drug repurposing for aging and age-related diseases. The company
utilizes the GeroScope™, OncoFinder™ , Pathway Cloud Intelligence™ and
PharmAtlas™ packages for aging and cancer research, pursues internal
drug discovery programs, and provides services to pharmaceutical
companies. For more information on Insilico Medicine, please visit http://www.insilicomedicine.com.
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