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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…

What You Should Know: Pepper Bio, the “Google Maps for drug discovery,” today announced an oversubscribed $6.5 million seed round led by NFX with participation from Silverton Partners, Merck Digital Sciences Studio, Mana Ventures, Tensility Ventures, VSC Ventures, and more. Pepper Bio is the world’s first transomics company, which maps data across all the -omics layers and translates it into the fastest route for discovering new drugs, finding new uses for existing therapeutics,…

By Jon Hu, CEO and Cofounder of Pepper Bio  Pepper Bio, the world’s first transomics drug discovery company, announced the addition of Simon Fricker, Ph.D., as chief development officer. Previously, Dr. Fricker served three years as vice president of research and development at Phio Pharmaceuticals, a publicly-traded clinical-stage biotechnology company, and eight years as a distinguished scientific fellow at Genzyme/Sanofi. In his new role at Pepper, Dr. Fricker will support the…

Jon Hu Forbes Councils Member Artificial intelligence (AI) has penetrated nearly every industry, but the pharmaceutical industry could arguably benefit from AI the most. According to the results of a study performed by Insider Intelligence, AI has the potential to curb drug discovery costs for pharma companies by nearly 70%. It can do this by making accurate, more nuanced predictions about a disease or drug. However, if the data feeding into…

Jon Hu Forbes Councils Member Everyone likes to point fingers at big pharma. They’ll point to how much money it takes to develop a single drug (up to $2.8 billion on average)—or point to how a drug caused severe, long-term side effects that result in it coming off the market—ultimately throwing that money down the drain. But ironically, they’re missing the point. The problem isn’t the cost; the cost is an effect…

The drug discovery firm will work with the Dean Felsher laboratory, using the company's transomics platform to discover therapies for untreatable cancers. Researchers at Stanford University's Dean Felsher laboratory have announced plans to collaborate with drug discovery company Pepper Bio in an effort to identify therapeutic targets for untreatable lymphatic and liver cancers. With the help of Pepper Bio's platform on phosphoproteomics, the collaborators reportedly aim to identify and validate…