There’s a clear pain point when it comes to drug discovery: Depending on which study you cite, creating an approved drug costs anywhere from $985 million to $2.6 billion. And R&D returns have rebounded to only about 2.5% in 2020, up from a low of 1.6% in 2019. Not to mention the fact that drugs that fail in clinical trials don’t actually help people who need new treatments.
With a problem like that, there’s little surprise that we’ve seen countless startups entering the drug development space, each looking to carve out their own niche. That might be AI-based drug discovery, advanced proteomics (the study of proteins and their interactions) or, for one newly launched company, layers upon layers of biological data.
On Thursday, Pepper Bio, a seed-stage company based in Boston, emerged from stealth. Pepper Bio has been building a “computational platform,” to use co-founder and chief scientific officer Samantha Dale Strasser’s words, that the company believes can aid in drug discovery.
Read on to learn how Pepper is changing drug discovery.
Source: TechCrunch // See original post here.