Zafrens

"We think [this approach] to drug discovery and analysis where we miniaturize everything - we do high throughput experiments, but also high resolution experiments - will reveal insights that will allow us to try to democratize and make drug discovery simpler and cheaper" Swamy Vijayan, Founder & CEO Zafrens on Bio_Unlock Episode #002: The Future of Drug Discovery. Watch the full conversation here: https://lnkd.in/dXmDRds6 (or wherever you get your podcasts)

Hello everyone, I am delighted to share our financing update https://t.ly/iYcy7. We are just getting started in our mission to change how drug discovery (and all bio/chem/AI) experiments are done, so more updates to come; today, I'd like to take the opportunity to acknowledge the immense amount of work that our team has put in to solve some of the foundational challenges in biology. At Zafrens we are able to simultaneously image and sequence cells such that the molecular underpinnings of complex cell behavior becomes apparent - at massive scale. The implications of this ability are enormous (e.g., for large libraries of CRISPR probes one can map what each of the edits do to a cell functionally; for instance, could one edit enhance T cell killing? could one make a stem cell more proliferative, etc. Because this can be done for ALL the edits, it becomes the highest throughput machine learning tool in biology. The approach is agnostic to the perturbations - we can use other cells incubated with a cell of interest to monitor cell-cell interactions, and also use large chemical libraries to map drug-cell interactions with multiomics and functional response. This is a reimagination of experiments we all do in the lab from the ground-up; we can do this on a bench top at a scale that only very-big pharma has been able to afford so far). We feel an immense responsibility to shepherd these innovations to have the most social impact, so we are grateful to Prime Movers Lab, BlueYard Capital, and our other investors who have believed in us and supported our mission so far. Justin Briggs, Juan Bautista Pinilla and Jason D. Whitmire have been the best partners an entrepreneur could hope for, especially in this turbulent environment. Thank you! We have ambition in spades, so we will raise more money and build more partnerships, when we do so we will need more friends who can grow the company with us. We are always interested in interdisciplinary skills and an ability to collaborate with people from diverse backgrounds. We are also always interested in speaking with experienced leaders in different therapeutic modalities who are open to new ways of advancing medicines. We would love to chat with BD folks who are curious about our approach, as well. Looking forward to an exciting 2024!