What You Should Know:
– Protai, a Tel Aviv, Israel-based AI-powered drug discovery startup, today announced its emergence from stealth, along with an $8 million seed financing round co-led by Grove Ventures and Pitango HealthTech.
– Protai empowers drug discovery with proteomics and artificial intelligence to unlock new layers of biological insights and to combat complex diseases.
Proteomics-based Platform for Faster and More Accurate Drug Discovery
Despite the significant contribution of genome-level information to the efforts of drug R&D, this information fails to represent the functional layer of the cell reflected and dominated by proteins. This lack of functional understanding of a disease’s molecular mechanisms is one of the main shortcomings of the current drug discovery and development process.
Founded by Eran Seger and Kirill Pevzner, Protai has built an end-to-end AI-based platform that comprehensively maps the course of a disease on the protein level, enhancing the ability to observe cellular function and thereby improving the way new drugs are discovered. This effective approach enables Protai to increase accuracy in drug discovery and improve the development process, substantially saving time and lowering the costs of R&D.
The company plans to use the funding to further develop Protai’s platform, accelerate its discovery programs and enhance its partnerships with pharmaceutical companies.
