Somite Therapeutics, a Boston, MA-based TechBio company leveraging big data and AI to introduce novel cell replacement therapies, raised a $4.8M extension of its pre-seed funding.
This round, which brought total funds raised to over $10M, was led by Astellas Venture Management and Montage Ventures, with participation from Nachum Shamir, former Chairman and CEO of Luminex, and Paul and Dr. Kendra Harris, a renowned clinician with extensive experience in clinical trials. Dr. Nagisa Sakurai, Senior Investment Manager at Astellas Venture Management, Dr. Daphne Che, and Dr. Kendra Harris, will be joining Somite as a Board Observer.
The additional funding will be used to expedite data generation to train Somite’s AI platform, AlphaStem, advance SMT-M01 toward the clinic, start a second clinical program, SMT-B01, using brown adipocytes to treat metabolic disorders, and begin research with hypoimmune cell lines.
Led by Dr. Micha Breakstone, Founder and CEO, Somite Therapeutics is a stem cell biology company developing AI foundation models to produce human tissue for cell therapies at scale for diseases such as diabetes, obesity, and muscular dystrophies. Its AI platform, AlphaStem, enables new cell therapies, generating massive data that further improve the platform, empowering therapy creation with broader applications. The company’s pipeline includes the promising SMT-M01 program for Duchenne muscular dystrophy (DMD) and the SMT-B01 program for metabolic disorders.
The team includes:
Somite Management Team:
- Micha Breakstone, PhD: CEO and Co-founder – Repeat AI entrepreneur (Chorus.ai acq. for $575m)
- Jonathan Rosenfeld, PhD: CTO and Co-founder – Head of the Fundamental AI group at MIT FutureTech
- Carl Morris, PhD: Chief Scientific Officer
- Kristy Brown, PhD: SVP Translational Development
- Shai Kivity, VP Strategy & Operations
Scientific Co-founders:
- Olivier Pourquie, PhD: Professor of Genetics and Pathology, Harvard Medical School and Brigham and Women’s Hospital
- Allon Klein, PhD: Professor of Systems Biology at Harvard Medical School
- Cliff Tabin, PhD: Chair of the Department of Genetics at Harvard Medical School
- Jay Shendure, PhD: HHMI Professor of Genome Sciences at University of Washington
FinSMEs
09/09/2024