Turbine, a company developing a cell behavior simulation platform, has announced the closing of a €20 million Series A financing round.
International law firm Osborne Clarke advised Turbine. The team was led by corporate partner Matthew Edwards and included corporate associates Courtney Fowler and Laurence Nelson, and tax associate Ben Doeh.
Mercia and MSD Global Health Innovation (GHI) Fund (MSD is the trade name of Merck & Co., Inc., Rahway NJ, USA) co-led the financing, joined by Day One Capital and existing investors Accel, Delin Ventures, and XTX Ventures. In conjunction with the financing, MSD GHI Fund and Mercia Asset Management have delegated members to Turbine's new Board.
Turbine will use the financing proceeds to drive its next generation, potential first-in-class programs targeting DNA Damage Repair. These programs were the first ever to be selected using Turbine’s proprietary Simulated Cell, which revealed relationships not described in public data before. Turbine leverages its technology at every stage of development, identifying associated biomarkers and combination strategies, as well as selecting in vitro and in vivo biological models for experimental validation.
Turbine partners with biopharmaceutical companies seeking to deploy simulation to understand patients and overcome causes of resistance hindering drug development efforts in the clinic. Simulated Cells have already guided the pipelines of several global partners generating multiple predictions currently in clinical validation, including Bayer and two of the top 20 pharma companies by global revenue in 2021. Furthermore, the technology successfully identified dozens of clinically validated targets invisible to any other computational approach.
Osborne Clarke's Corporate team works with clients across the life sciences and healthcare sector. The team advises at every stage of company development across all corporate issues, from equity and debt fundraisings to M&A, IPOs and JVs.
About Turbine
Based in London, UK, with offices in Budapest, Hungary and Cambridge, UK, Turbine was founded in 2016 by Kristof Szalay, Ph.D., Daniel Veres, M.D., Ph.D., and Szabolcs Nagy to overcome the limitations of existing methods in identifying oncology treatments that truly benefit the patients who receive them by combining molecular biology and artificial intelligence (AI). Since its founding, Turbine has developed and validated the Simulated Cell, a proprietary and cutting-edge platform that runs billions of simulations prior to ever initiating preclinical development guiding real-life experiments with invaluable biological insights. This improves the likelihood of success for truly novel therapies and allows existing assets to be optimally targeted to patients most likely to benefit from them. Turbine’s technology leverages artificial intelligence (AI) to build a constantly evolving, predictive simulation of cellular signaling. These virtual cells are used for in silico experiments having never been run in lab, capturing patient biology better than available experimental models and testing more drug-like effects than current high throughput screening approaches. Validating the uncovered mechanisms and using the resulting data as feedback further improves the model’s capabilities to reveal novel biological mechanisms. Simulations have already been validated from target discovery to patient stratification and life cycle management in collaborations with multiple big pharma companies. Turbine is now leveraging the Simulated Cell platform to develop its own stream of programs; expanding from an early focus on overcoming resistance to DNA Damage Response (DDR) inhibitors, the company is pursuing multiple high unmet oncology needs. Turbine is also working with partners to extend its pipeline to various modalities and cancer mechanisms. For more information, visit www.turbine.ai
