Parallel Bio, a Cambridge, MA-based biotech company, raised $4.3M in Seed funding.
The round was led by Refactor Capital, with participation from Y Combinator Jeff Dean, Breakout Ventures.
The company intends to use the funds to accelerate drug discovery.
Led by CEO Robert DiFazio and chief scientific officer Juliana Hilliard, Parallel Bio has developed a platform that replicates the human immune system in a dish for drug discovery and development. Through the combination of immune organoids, machine learning and robotics, it models human disease more realistically and accurately than animal testing to the fastest path to treatments and cures that work for more people.
Parallel Bio validated its ability to reproducibly model immune systems across a diverse patient background, including robotics and analytical pipelines for scale, and filed IP on key new technologies:
- Discovered eight human high affinity antibodies for cancer and infectious diseases.
- Pioneered the first high-throughput platform that can generate full blown immune responses to vaccines, allowing it to test hundreds of candidates simultaneously to know which ones will work best in patients to prevent future pandemics.
- Generated initial proof of concept for the first natural model of autoimmune disease, made possible by moving from mice to organoids, representing a potential breakthrough in treating these diseases.
- Built a large proprietary biobank of diverse patient backgrounds that enables modeling the biology of populations, a departure from current methods unable to take patient diversity into account.
FinSMEs
20/12/2022