Cel­lar­i­ty start­ed with a sim­ple — but far from easy — idea that Avak Kahve­jian and his team were float­ing around at Flag­ship Pi­o­neer­ing: to dig­i­tal­ly en­code a cell.

As he and his se­nior as­so­ciate Nick Plugis dug deep­er in­to the con­cept, they found that most of the mod­els oth­ers have de­vel­oped take a bot­tom-up ap­proach, where they as­sem­ble the mol­e­cules in­side cells and the con­nec­tions be­tween them from scratch. What if they opt for a top-down ap­proach, aid­ed by sin­gle-cell tran­scrip­tomics and ma­chine learn­ing, to gauge the be­hav­ior of the en­tire cel­lu­lar net­work?

“If you look at cell be­hav­ior from the per­spec­tive of a mol­e­c­u­lar net­work un­der­ly­ing it, then you free your­self from the tra­di­tion­al ap­proach of one-di­men­sion­al, two-di­men­sion­al, three-di­men­sion­al tar­get-based or phe­no­typ­ic-based drug dis­cov­ery ap­proach­es,” Kahve­jian, who took on the CEO role, told End­points News. “What it al­lows you to do is to use the net­work changes as your read­out.”

Flag­ship ded­i­cat­ed $50 mil­lion to get the biotech start­ed, which is how Cel­lar­i­ty has been fund­ing the build­out of its plat­form and an­i­mal ex­per­i­ments to ver­i­fy their ini­tial hy­pothe­ses in the past two years.

By in­ter­twin­ing wet labs and a dig­i­tal twin dubbed the Cel­lar­i­um, Kahve­jian be­lieves his biotech hasn’t just “re-ar­chi­tect­ed” ther­a­peu­tic dis­cov­ery, but al­so the or­ga­ni­za­tion of an AI up­start. Chad Nus­baum, founder of the Broad Tech­nol­o­gy Labs, leads the tech­ni­cal unit churn­ing out da­ta; while Milind Kamkolkar has joined as chief dig­i­tal & da­ta of­fi­cer af­ter pi­o­neer­ing the role at Sanofi.

“I want­ed to build stuff. I didn’t want to just keep sourc­ing stuff,” Kamkolkar said of his de­ci­sion to leave the phar­ma gi­ant, where ex­ter­nal part­ner­ship was the pro­to­col for gain­ing dig­i­tal com­pe­ten­cy.

It’s the com­plete op­po­site at Cel­lar­i­ty, as they are build­ing a new en­gine that can be bro­ken down in­to three lay­ers. He calls the first “da­ta in­ges­tion” — chan­nel­ing all the in­for­ma­tion gen­er­at­ed by Nus­baum’s team with mul­ti­ple method­olo­gies and species in­to a data­base where sci­en­tists can plot and cu­rate knowl­edge. Then they en­ter the ex­plo­ration lay­er, in­ter­ro­gat­ing the cell be­hav­iors while an­a­lyz­ing how well ex­ist­ing and new com­pounds can per­turb the cells. On the last lay­er, they vi­su­al­ize the find­ings by cre­at­ing a satel­lite im­age of sorts.

Right now Cel­lar­i­ty has about 250 of these dig­i­tal guides on dif­fer­ent dis­eases, which they call Cel­lar­i­ty Maps. And they can en­com­pass every step of the tra­di­tion­al drug dis­cov­ery process.

“The ma­chines are in­cred­i­bly ca­pa­ble of par­al­leliz­ing and col­laps­ing what typ­i­cal­ly used to be a lin­ear process to try to un­der­stand whether the im­pact of that drug ac­tu­al­ly does have tox­i­c­i­ty or side ef­fects,” Kamkolkar added.

With 40 staffers on board, Cel­lar­i­ty has gone broad with its tech plat­form, prob­ing any­thing from ep­ithe­lial bar­ri­er dis­or­ders and on­col­o­gy to hema­to­log­i­cal dis­or­ders and neu­rol­o­gy. The plat­form can ac­com­mo­date mul­ti­ple ther­a­peu­tic modal­i­ties, Kahve­jian said, and they’ve test­ed both small and large mol­e­cules. He isn’t dis­clos­ing a time­line for when they might steer their lead can­di­dates in­to the clin­ic, but he’s not shy about the am­bi­tion to tack­le “dozens of pro­grams” at a time, and part­ner­ing as he sees fit.

As of Sep­tem­ber, Cristi­na Rondi­none, the for­mer head of car­dio­vas­cu­lar, re­nal and meta­bol­ic dis­eases at As­traZeneca, has al­so joined as pres­i­dent to help grow the com­pa­ny and push it to the next stage, en­abling down­stream clin­i­cal de­vel­op­ment of leads.

The new hires will find them­selves in a hor­i­zon­tal or­ga­ni­za­tion where no one do­main su­per­sedes the oth­er, Kahve­jian said, and where bi­ol­o­gists, tech­nol­o­gists, and the com­pu­ta­tion­al folks work to­geth­er in an in­te­grat­ed and mul­ti­lin­gual en­vi­ron­ment where in­sights are gen­er­at­ed more quick­ly and are “ac­tion­able the minute they are gen­er­at­ed.”

Kamkolkar re­called the sur­prise of a ma­chine learn­ing sci­en­tist when he found out that he was to spend time in labs and see how the da­ta are gen­er­at­ed.

“Yeah, you’re gonna have to go in labs,” Kamkolkar ba­si­cal­ly said. “It’s quite unique.”

The average level of investment required for a biotech start-up to succeed is increasing every year, elevating the pressure even further on venture capital to make smart financial investments. Financial investment alone, however, does not always guarantee that exciting innovations can be transformed into real businesses that make a meaningful difference to patients.

Beyond just capital

At Astellas Venture Management (AVM) – a wholly-owned venture capital organization within Astellas, headquartered in the San Francisco Bay Area – capital is just one of the ingredients we offer to add value to our biotechnology investments and partnerships. We generally take a strategic investor approach for companies in our invested portfolio, providing access to expertise, technology and/or resources in addition to the injection of finance. An equity investment from AVM can include access to Astellas’ research and development (R&D) capabilities and expertise, and a global network of partner academic institutions and biotechnology companies, to help advance and accelerate the start-up’s innovation.

Unum $UMRX is working its way through a survival plan of sorts.

After getting hit with a trio of FDA holds in its brief public history and triggering its second pivot to a new lead drug program while laying off 60% of the staff, the troubled penny stock biotech Unum Therapeutics has hatched new plans to secure financial backing while lining up a go-forward strategy for the company.

First, Lincoln Park Capital Fund has agreed to buy up to $25 million of the long-suffering stock, as Unum directs. And the executive team — led by CEO Chuck Wilson — has put everything on the table for consideration: a sale, acquisition, merger, licensing deal, you name it. The ACTR707 program, meanwhile, is being formally wrapped up — their second failed lead program.