Tim Lu

Fa­mous MIT re­searcher Tim Lu took the wraps off a transpa­cif­ic biotech he’d launched a lit­tle over three years ago with his broth­er Jef­frey with a $10 mil­lion seed round, at­tempt­ing to use ma­chine learn­ing to de­vel­op new small mol­e­cule drugs. Now, the com­pa­ny is ready to take its next step.

En­gine Bio­sciences un­veiled its first ma­jor VC round with a $43 mil­lion Se­ries A, the biotech an­nounced Wednes­day morn­ing. Over the last three years, the com­pa­ny has worked to es­tab­lish its plat­form, Jef­frey Lu — who is En­gine’s CEO — told End­points News, and re­cent­ly nom­i­nat­ed two tar­gets for their in­ter­nal pipeline.

With the new funds, Lu ex­pects En­gine has enough run­way to get its lead pro­gram in­to its first clin­i­cal tri­al by 2023.

Back in 2018, the Lu broth­ers were part of a wave of biotechs that set the field abuzz, with their ef­forts to tie AI and ma­chine learn­ing to hands-on drug de­vel­op­ment work. It’s an idea that’s gained trac­tion over the last sev­er­al years, as more com­pa­nies and bio­phar­mas aim to speed up the dis­cov­ery process and cut down on R&D costs.

James Collins

Their team al­so in­clud­ed a host of big names in the field, in­clud­ing Tim Lu’s MIT col­league Jim Collins, Mayo Clin­ic pro­fes­sor Hu Li and UC-San Diego re­searcher Prashant Mali.

En­gine’s ap­proach com­bines two dif­fer­ent sys­tems in­to one plat­form. The first al­lows the com­pa­ny to test how hun­dreds of thou­sands of pos­si­ble ge­net­ic com­bi­na­tions can be af­fect­ed by ed­its or changes, and the sec­ond feeds those ex­per­i­ments in­to an al­go­rithm that can pre­dict how those changes might be im­pli­cat­ed by new drugs.

Jef­frey Lu said re­searchers can start with ei­ther sys­tem, but En­gine it­self be­gan on the ex­per­i­ment side.

“It’s kind of chick­en and egg for what comes first,” Lu told End­points. “[The sys­tem] al­lows us to use things like CRISPR for mul­ti­ple ed­its in a sin­gle cell, knock­ing down or switch­ing ex­pres­sion two or three at a time, and see­ing what hap­pens to a cell.”

Af­ter three years of buildup, how­ev­er, Lu added that the AI al­go­rithm is ad­vanced enough to func­tion as the start­ing point as well, mak­ing pre­dic­tions about how edit­ed cells might re­act to drugs. That work can then be checked by re­searchers, us­ing the plat­form to con­duct its ex­per­i­ments.

En­gine has tak­en ad­van­tage of CRISPR thus far to con­duct some of its edit­ing ex­per­i­ments, but the plat­form is adapt­able to oth­er meth­ods such as mi­croR­NA and gene ex­pres­sion, Lu said. It’s al­lowed them to prep its first pipeline can­di­date where they’re go­ing af­ter liv­er, ovar­i­an and col­orec­tal can­cer all at once.

The biotech’s plat­form helped dis­cov­er a ge­net­ic mu­ta­tion linked to all three of these can­cer types, though Jef­frey Lu is keep­ing his cards close to the vest here. He de­clined to re­veal both the tar­get and the bio­mark­er for this small mol­e­cule pro­gram, not­ing on­ly that IND stud­ies will like­ly be­gin in 2022 with the goal for a 2023 clin­i­cal tri­al.

En­gine’s sec­ond pro­gram, which is a bit fur­ther be­hind the lead, is aim­ing for triple neg­a­tive breast can­cer at first.

Wednes­day’s round was led by Po­laris Part­ners, joined by a promi­nent undis­closed Sin­ga­pore firm and In­vus. Ex­ist­ing in­vestors al­so par­tic­i­pat­ed, in­clud­ing 6 Di­men­sions Cap­i­tal, WuXi AppTec, DHVC, ED­BI, Baidu Ven­tures, Vec­tr Ven­tures, Good­man Cap­i­tal, WI Harp­er, and Nest.Bio.

President Joe Biden made clear in his “finish the job” State of the Union address last night that one of those jobs to be finished is insulin prices.

Biden’s push again to tackle insulin prices, after Republicans rebuffed the idea last summer and just after Biden won Medicare drug price negotiations/caps via the Inflation Reduction Act, shows how heavily he’s leaning into this work.

As talk of AI this-and-that gobbles up headline after headline, one Big Pharma is losing its AI leader as she transitions to another drug giant: Iya Khalil will trade in her hat as Novartis’ go-to expert and leader in the space for Merck as VP and head of data, AI and genome sciences next week.

After nearly three years leading the artificial intelligence team at Novartis — as Big Pharma and biotechs alike latch onto the ripening AI-for-drug-discovery mode of operation — Khalil will switch employers to head up a similar post at Merck, where she’ll work out of Cambridge, MA beginning Feb. 13, the company tells Endpoints News.

Six weeks into his new role at the helm of Teva Pharmaceutical, Richard Francis said it’s time to “get back to growth,” starting with a good look at the company’s priorities.

The chief executive has kicked off a strategic review, he announced during Teva’s quarterly call, which will continue over the next several months and produce results sometime in the middle of 2023. That means some pipeline cuts may be in store, he told Endpoints News, while declining to offer much more detail.

FDA Commissioner Rob Califf joined the heads of the CDC and NIH in the hot seat today before a key House subcommittee, explaining that there needs to be a much faster, more coordinated way to oversee vaccine safety, and that foreign biopharma inspections, halted for years due to the pandemic, are slowly ramping up again.

Califf, who stressed to the House Energy and Commerce’s Subcommittee on Health that the CDC also needs better data, made clear that the FDA’s ability to monitor the safety of vaccines “would also benefit greatly by a coordinated federal public health data reporting authority.”