Key points from article :
Terray Therapeutics, a biotech company based in Los Angeles, has secured $120 million in Series B funding. This funding will help them advance their AI-driven drug discovery efforts and move their small molecule therapeutics closer to clinical trials. The company focuses on diseases, particularly age-related ones, and aims to expand the capabilities of its AI platform to address these complex health challenges.
Terray's approach integrates advanced AI with large-scale lab data. Over the past three years, they have created what they claim to be the world’s largest chemistry dataset, involving more than five billion target-ligand interactions. This massive dataset allows them to better understand the biochemical relationships between disease targets and potential treatments. Their method shortens the time for drug development, completing the cycle of design, testing, and analysis in less than a month.
In collaboration with Calico, a longevity biotech company, Terray aims to identify small molecule leads to target age-related diseases. Calico will handle the development and commercialisation of discoveries, while Terray is eligible for milestone payments and royalties. This partnership focuses on leveraging Terray's AI to better assess interactions at a biochemical level, aiming to improve the success rate of developing new drugs.
The recent funding round, which brings Terray’s total funding to over $200 million, was led by Bedford Ridge Capital and NVentures, NVIDIA's venture arm. Kimberly Powell from NVIDIA highlighted that Terray’s combination of rapid experiments and AI, such as their COATI models, creates an efficient “flywheel” effect for molecule discovery.
Dr. Jacob Berlin, co-founder and CEO, emphasised that while understanding of diseases has grown rapidly, the ability to create effective treatments hasn't kept pace, and Terray’s AI integration aims to address this gap effectively by speeding up the discovery and development of new therapeutics.
