American startup "DeepCure" completed a $ 40 million round of funding and intends to establish a laboratory in Israel

DeepCure, a company that specializes in discovering and developing drugs using artificial intelligence (AI), has announced the completion of a $ 40 million round of funding, led by biotech fund Morningside Ventures. The company's total fundraising since its inception reaches $ 47 million.
With the help of the fundraising money, the company intends to establish a laboratory in Israel that will add a physical dimension to the process - and perform a synthesis of the detected molecules, with the results used to further optimize the models. "It's the connection to the physical world. Artificial intelligence is an amazing tool but in the end drugs are manufactured in the real world," says Schreiber.
According to him, today the time it takes from the launch of a drug development program to the arrival of a clinical trial in humans is 7-6 years on average. "Our goal is to reduce this time to at least two years. Our oldest drug development program is 9 months old - a cancer drug - and we believe that within a year and a half it will be submitted to the FDA for clinical trials." He said, "In pharma companies it is difficult to innovate today, and it is bureaucratic for them to change the way they work. I believe the innovation will come from companies like Defecure and the like."
Defecure is an American company based in Boston. The CEO and co-founder is the Israeli Kfir Schreiber, and one of the investors in the company is the Israeli TLV Partners fund. Other investors are Sapir Venture Partners and Benon Group. The company currently employs 26 people in Boston.
Defecure is part of a new wave of companies trying to improve and streamline existing drug development processes, using tools of computational learning and artificial intelligence. It was founded in 2018 by Schreiber, along with Dr. Joseph Jacobson, who serves as the lead researcher, and Tras Caridis, the lead technologist. All three recognized MIT.
The company is involved in the development of drugs based on small molecules, ie drugs that are usually marketed in pill form, similar to paracetamol, as opposed to, for example, biological treatments based on antibodies given as an infusion. The company is currently working on five programs to develop anti-cancer drugs, inflammatory diseases and immune system diseases. The most advanced program is currently in the experimental stages in animals.
The company's technology is trying to streamline and shorten the phase of drug discovery and optimization. Using computational methods and computerized learning, the company's system scans a pool containing a huge amount of molecules (10 to 18, quintillion) that are possible drugs, in an attempt to find the "best candidates" - that is, molecules with high potential to cure disease. Schreiber explains that for comparison, today pharma companies scan only millions of molecules, making it difficult for them to produce enough candidates, especially when it comes to hard targets.
Next, Defecure's system tries to predict the various properties required for the drug to be effective and non-toxic. According to Schreiber, "the goal of the whole process is to put together an ideal drug profile with the ability to be successful in the next stages of drug development, including clinical trials."