SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Verge Genomics, a tech-enabled drug discovery company pioneering the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and human data to develop new drugs, announced today that Fierce Biotech named it as a 2022 “Fierce 15” recipient, a recognition given to the biopharmaceutical industry’s most promising early-stage companies.
Verge deeply integrates new advances in hardware, software, and molecular technologies across the entire drug development process to find better drugs, faster. The company pursues a simple but radical premise: to successfully develop medicines for humans, we need to start with humans. Verge is one of the first AI-enabled drug discovery companies to uncover a novel target – PIKfyve – and develop it into a clinical candidate entirely inside its own walls. It is poised to enter the clinic later this year as a treatment for amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), just four years after the target was identified.
Eli Lilly and Company and Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (“Merck GHI”) recently participated in an oversubscribed $98 million equity financing, following the announcement of a three-year, $706 million partnership between Eli Lilly and Verge to research and develop novel therapies for ALS. “Our partnership with Lilly and investment by Merck GHI demonstrate industry confidence in the ability of Verge’s AI/ML-enabled CONVERGE™ platform to deliver novel targets and to develop them rapidly into viable clinical candidates,” said Alice Zhang, CEO and co-founder of Verge Genomics.
The Fierce 15 celebrates the spirit of being “fierce” – championing innovation and creativity, even in the face of intense competition.
“We’re in a watershed moment for biotech, where technological innovations in chemistry, engineering, biology, physics, and material science are converging at an unprecedented pace,” said Zhang. “This has forged a new wave of biotechnology companies led by non-traditional CEOs. We’re happy to see an increasing recognition of the role that companies like Verge are playing in shaping tomorrow’s biotech ecosystem.”
This is Fierce Biotech’s 20th annual Fierce 15 selection. An internationally recognized daily report reaching a network of over 450,000 biotech and pharma industry professionals, Fierce Biotech provides subscribers with an authoritative analysis of the day's top stories. Every year Fierce Biotech evaluates hundreds of early-stage companies from around the world for its annual Fierce 15 list, which is based on a variety of factors such as the strength of its technology, partnerships, venture backers and a competitive market position.
About Fierce Biotech
Fierce Biotech is the biotech industry's daily monitor, an email newsletter and web resource providing the latest biotech news, articles, and resources related to clinical trials, drug discovery, FDA approval, FDA regulation, patent news, pharma news, biotech company news and more. More than 450,000 top biotech professionals rely on Fierce Biotech for an insider briefing on the day's top stories. Signup is free at www.fiercebiotech.com/signup.
About Verge Genomics
Verge uses AI and human data to develop better drugs faster for the most challenging diseases of our generation. Verge has built CONVERGE™, an end-to-end drug discovery and development platform, that integrates multiple technological innovations from discovery to translation to streamline drug development. Its pioneering use of the industry’s most advanced all-in-human AI-powered drug discovery platform identifies new medicines more efficiently and with an improved probability of success.
Verge is one of the first AI-enabled drug discovery companies to internally develop a clinical candidate from a novel target discovered from its platform. Verge has further demonstrated the power of CONVERGE™ by delivering a broad preclinical and discovery pipeline spanning diverse therapeutic areas, with its first program, an investigational PIKfyve inhibitor for the treatment of ALS, expected to enter the clinic in 2022. The company is led by experienced drug developers and computational biologists with a shared belief that technology has created a new opportunity to deliver life-changing medicines more efficiently.
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