Xaira Therapeutics, an AI-based drug discovery and development company, announced its launch with over $1 billion in capital.
The biotech company is a joint incubation of ARCH Venture Partners and Foresite Labs, the lead investors in the funding round.
Also participating in the round were Lux Capital, Two Sigma Ventures, F-Prime, Rsquared, SV Angel, Menlo Ventures, Sequoia Capital, NEA, Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy (PICI), Byers Capital and Lightspeed Venture Partners.
WHAT ARE YOU DOING
Xaira uses machine learning research, data generation models and therapeutic product development to create an AI-enabled platform for drug discovery and development across multiple modalities. It will focus on targets that are traditionally difficult to drug.
The company is made up of a group of researchers who developed RF diffusion and RF antibody models for protein and antibody design. The team will advance these models to connect biological targets and engineered molecules related to human diseases.
“Driven by growing data sets and new methods, progress in artificial intelligence and its applications to medicine, biology and chemistry has accelerated, including seminal work from David Baker’s laboratory at the Institute of Design in Proteins,” Dr. Vikram Bajaj, CEO of Foresite Labs and CEO of Foresite Capital, said in a statement.
“By starting Xaira, we have brought together incredible multidisciplinary capabilities and talent at the right time to reimagine our entire approach, from drug discovery to clinical development.”
MARKET SNAPSHOT
The California-based company is led by CEO Dr. Marc Tessier-Lavigne, who previously served as Genentech’s chief scientific officer and was president of Rockefeller University and Stanford University.
Tessier-Lavigne resigned from Stanford University last August after controversy arose over research misconduct over twelve scientific research papers he co-authored.
The university launched a formal investigation, which concluded that he was not aware of the fraud found in his laboratory’s scientific papers, but that “there may have been opportunities to improve laboratory oversight and management.”
Other members of Xaira’s executive team include co-founder Dr. Hetu Kamisetty, formerly of Meta and the Institute for Protein Design; Dr. Arvind Rajpal, who worked on large molecule drug discovery at Genentech; and Dr. Don Kirkpatrick, former chief technology officer of Interline Therapeutics and former director of Genentech.