Deep Knowledge Ventures Finances Life-Extension Start-up, Personalized Medicine Service
Hong Kong, P.R.C. (PRWEB) April 15, 2014 -- Deep Knowledge Ventures has announced seed investments into Pathway Pharmaceuticals in Hong Kong and InSilico Medicine, Inc in Baltimore, Maryland. The investments are the first to be made from the firm’s recently closed inaugural fund, which aims to capture the value of medical advances that increase longevity. It has a stated focus on regenerative medicine, bioinformatics and personalized medicine.
Dmitry Kaminskiy, Managing Director of Deep Knowedge Ventures, previously co-founded and helped finance the Center for Biogerontology and Regenerative Medicine (CBRM) at the Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology and is a trustee of the Biogerontology Research Foundation in the United Kingdom. Announcing the investments he stated:
“Not only it is our duty to ameliorate the suffering of the elderly by advancing research in biogerontology and making it accessible to the general public, but we also must educate the stakeholders on the opportunity these advances may present in terms of economic growth”
Pathway Pharmaceuticals is a personalized medicine company that last week announced the launch of its services to medical professionals worldwide. The service tests the effects of drugs that are approved by national regulatory agencies on gene expression in patient tumor biopsies using the OncoFINDER™ tool. Using advanced algorithms OncoFINDER™ is able to predict drug efficacy by comparing the gene expression data of tumor biopsies to a large sample of data from healthy tissue collected over 7 years.
This valuable information can also be used to analyze the efficacy of treatments currently in clinical trials and in the laboratory. InSilico Medicine, Inc has an exclusive license to drug discoveries it makes using OncoFINDER data and is the second seed investment of Deep Knowledge Ventures. Since 2008 the research team behind InSilico Medicine, Inc has been developing what it describes as the most comprehensive scalable drug knowledge management system of annotated drugs, small molecules, biologics available. The longer term goal of the company is to partner with top pharmaceutical companies to help analyze their drug databases and lead compounds, improve enrollment into clinical trials, and to enable them to accurately predict the efficacy of their drugs on patient groups and individual patients.
Notably both investments offer the potential for returns outside of the usual drug development timeframe with their focus on provision of services. The potential for patentable research outcomes is high, according to CEO Professor Alex Zhavoronkov, PhD:
“We built our platform on years of experience of a large international team using gene expression data from individual patient’s tumor to predict the effectiveness of targeted compounds and improve clinical decision making. At InSilico Medicine we are reinventing this system for drug discovery in both cancer and aging. In addition to finding the new therapies and personalizing the treatment for individual patients, we are looking for drugs already in clinical practice that may have aging-suppressive effects. Deep Knowledge Ventures is a great venture capital firm to work with and I have no doubt that their focus on companies utilizing Big Data in biomedicine and working on increasing productive longevity will yield unprecedented returns.”
Deep Knowledge Ventures continues to seek out new investment opportunities in regenerative medicine, bioinformatics and personalized medicine.
About Pathway Pharmaceuticals Limited
Pathway Pharmaceuticals Limited is a personalized medicine company providing solutions to medical professionals, healthcare providers and pharmaceutical companies that help make more informed decisions when selecting cancer therapies for individual patients. The company developed a leading genetic and epigenetic analysis system, the OncoFinder™ for analyzing signaling pathways, evaluating pathway activation strength and predicting the drug scores for the large list of thoroughly annotated targeted drugs. The company is based in Hong Kong with operations in the United States, Russia and the United Kingdom. For more information, please visit http://www.pathwaypharmaceuticals.com
About InSilico Medicine, Inc
Since 2008 the research team behind InSilico Medicine has worked hard to develop the most comprehensive scalable drug knowledge management system of annotated drugs, small molecules, biologics and all other factors that may influence the many events on the molecular, cellular and tissue levels. The company uses their expertise in targeted drug selection based on individual patient’s gene expression data and signaling cloud regulation for drug discovery in oncology and aging. The longer term goal of InSilico Medicine is to partner with the top pharmaceutical companies to help analyze their drug databases and lead compounds, improve enrollment into clinical trials, and to enable them to accurately predict the efficacy of their drugs on patient groups and individual patients. For more information, please visit http://www.insilicomedicine.com
Notes to Editors
On Thursday, April 3, 2014, Pathway Pharmaceuticals announced the launch of the Personalized Cancer Treatment Service to enable medical professionals to predict the efficacy of therapies for individual cancer patients. The key tool, OncoFinder is suitable not only for cancer treatment efficacy prediction, but also for simulating the patient's body's reaction on geroprotectors:
- http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/04/prweb11729350.htm
Insilico Medicine Inc announced its drug development program and licensing deal with Pathway Pharmaceuticals on March 8th 2014:
- http://www.prweb.com/releases/2014/03/prweb11644588.htm
Dmitry Kaminiskiy, Managing Director of Deep Knowledge Ventures, became a Trustee of the UK’s Biogerontology Research Foundation on 1st April 2014:
Charles Groome, Deep Knowledge Ventures, http://www.deepknowledgeventures.com, +44 2032891994, [email protected]
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