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Pepper Bio landed $6.5 million in seed funding led by NFX. The startup wants to improve the drug-discovery process for pharma companies using AI. Pepper Bio is also developing treatments itself and expects to begin clinical trials next year. Drug discovery is expensive and time-consuming for pharmaceutical and biotech companies. From identifying the right biological targets implicated in a disease, to developing drugs that impact those targets through years-long clinical…

By Jonathan D. Grinstein, PhD My interview with Pepper Bio CEO Jon Hu begins with one of the most frequently repeated phrases I hear when speaking with drug developers: “We are a drug developer trying to tackle untreatable diseases,” Hu says. In Hu’s opinion, however, Pepper Bio’s computational approach that uses “functional” omics data, which they’ve dubbed “transomics,” will set them apart in their quest to combat incurable diseases. So…

NEW YORK — Drug discovery and bioinformatics startup Pepper Bio said on Thursday that it has raised $6.5 million in seed funding. The financing round was led by NFX and included Silverton Partners, Merck Digital Sciences Studio, Mana Ventures, Tensility Ventures, and VSC Ventures. Pepper Bio was founded in 2020 through a Merck-run accelerator program to leverage a multiomics approach — dubbed transomics — to identify new therapeutics, repurpose existing ones, and…

In the heart of Boston, amidst the intellectual hum of scientific innovation, Pepper Bio, self-styled as the "Google Maps for drug discovery," has emerged as a groundbreaking entity in the realm of pharmaceutical exploration. On November 30, 2023, the company proudly announced an impressively oversubscribed seed funding round, amassing $6.5 million. This financial infusion, spearheaded by NFX and bolstered by contributions from an array of investors including Silverton Partners, Merck Digital Sciences Studio,…

Whether you are a tech optimist or not, you have to acknowledge that progress rarely follows a straight line. While the world keeps getting better at churning semiconductors, we are still struggling to find new drugs to treat resistant diseases, and the process isn’t getting cheaper. Some hope that AI can help, and it likely will — when it comes to biotech, it is much more than a buzzword. But Boston-based drug discovery…

Pepper’s Compass platform offers insight into the real-time function of proteins, which can help in drug discovery. Boston-based start-up Pepper Bio has raised $6.5m in oversubscribed seed funding to develop its Compass drug discovery platform. The financiers included venture capital companies such as NFX, Silverton Partners, Mana Ventures and others. Pepper’s CEO Jon Hu told Pharmaceutical Technology that the Compass platform provides biological maps for insight into different “-omics”- genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics…