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 and phosphoproteomics.
The success rate of drug development from pre-clinical studies to regulatory approval is 3%-10%, says Hu. If one can improve this success rate, it can bring down the cost of drug approval, he adds. According to Hu, the high cost of development is driven by the cost of failed iterations of the therapy.
Pepper sources its database consists of publicly and commercially available data in addition to its proprietary data, which was either generated in-house or acquired through partnerships. Hu added that public and commercial data undergoes a series of transformations including an expansion process, during which useful data across multiple different species are aggregated together. This is followed by a curation process to effectively keep only “the best, most robust data for our platform”.
Pepper’s pipeline consists of four oncology candidates in the early and late stages of discovery. Three of these therapy candidates are for MYC-driven cancers, the overexpression of MYC-gene is characteristic of malignancy.
Reposted from: Pharmaceutical Technology // See original article here.