PALO ALTO, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--twoXAR, Inc., a company pioneering digital approaches to drug discovery, announced today that it has raised $3.4 million in seed financing led by Andreessen Horowitz. Joining Andreessen Horowitz in this financing round are existing twoXAR investors CLI Ventures and the Stanford-StartX Fund, which was co-founded by the StartX accelerator, Stanford University, and Stanford Health Care. twoXAR will use these funds to expand its engineering and commercial teams and advance the progress of new and existing partnerships focused on drug candidates for metabolic and neurological diseases.
“The confluence of biology and computer science has opened up significant opportunities for the life sciences to address inefficiencies that have plagued the biopharmaceutical industry, namely the long development timelines and high costs associated with getting new medicines into the hands of patients,” said Vijay Pande, PhD, a General Partner at Andreessen Horowitz. “twoXAR’s approach of using computation to draw insights from independent data sources offers an exciting path forward for accelerating early-stage discovery and they are well positioned to lead the technological innovation that will reshape biopharmaceutical research and development over the next decade.”
Founded in 2014, twoXAR (pronounced: “two-czar”) is a technology-driven drug discovery company whose patent-pending algorithms enable it to find unanticipated associations between drug and disease orders of magnitudes faster than wet lab-based approaches. The company’s DUMA™ platform rapidly evaluates massive public and proprietary datasets to identify and rank high probability drug-disease matches. These drug-disease matches can then be used to prioritize existing candidates, perform targeted searches and identify novel drug candidates for further clinical testing.
“Our mission is to improve health through computational medicine. Through our DUMA platform, we are working to disrupt the economics of drug discovery and accelerate the delivery of more effective medicines to patients fighting rare and common illnesses,” said Andrew A. Radin, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of twoXAR. “We are pleased to welcome Andresseen Horowitz to the twoXAR team and look forward to working closely with all our investors as we accelerate the expansion of our commercial operations and advance our partnerships with large and small R&D organizations working to improve portfolio management and expand new drug pipelines.”
twoXAR has identified a number of candidates that they are actively taking through preclinical studies in collaboration with leading patient advocacy, academic research and biopharmaceutical organizations. The technology is being validated through these collaborations and has been tested on more than 20 diseases to date. For more information please visit, www.twoXAR.com.
About twoXAR
Founded in 2014, twoXAR is transforming how large biological datasets are harnessed to accelerate the identification and validation of new medicines. Based in Palo Alto, California, the twoXAR team includes experts in drug discovery, biomedical informatics, computational biology, data science, software development and preclinical validation. For more information please visit, www.twoXAR.com.
