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 landmark cancer drug imatinib has been on the market since 2001, first sold by Novartis as Gleevec and in recent years as a generic. Now, a new Boston biotech is aiming to repurpose the drug as a treatment for pulmonary arterial hypertension.

Aerovate emerged from stealth Thursday and announced a $72.6 million Series A, which will be used to develop and run trials for its candidate AV-101 — a dry powder version of imatinib meant to be used with an inhaler. The company emerged from RA Capital’s incubator and funding was led by Sofinnova.

The old AveXis team is moving quickly in Dallas.

Three months ago, they launched Taysha with $30 million in Series A funding and a pipeline of gene therapies out of UT Southwestern. Now, they’ve announced an oversubscribed $95 million Series B. And the biotech is declining all interview requests on the news, the kind of broad silence that can indicate an IPO is in the pipeline.

Biotechs, including those relatively fresh off launch, have been going public at a frenzy since the pandemic began. Investors have showed a willingness to put upwards of $200 million to companies that have yet to bring a drug into the clinic. Still, if Taysha were to go public in the near future, it would be perhaps the shortest path from launch to IPO in recent biotech memory.