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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,…