Pragma Bio, a South San Francisco, CA-based technology-enabled platform for drug discovery, raised $10M in Equity funding.
The round, which brought the total venture backing to $15M, was led by The Venture Collective, Viking Global Investors, Merck Global Health Innovation Fund and CJ Investments.
The company intends to use the funds to continue its development of proprietary methods in genomic sequencing, artificial intelligence and synthetic biology to discover biomarkers and novel therapeutics to treat immunologic disorders.
Led by CEO Kareem Barghouti, Pragma Bio is a tech-enabled therapeutics company creating a map of chemicals designed by nature, housed in humans, and linked to immune-related health outcomes. The company is leveraging technologies in machine learning and synthetic biology to scale intelligent discovery with iterative biomanufacturing in the pursuit of novel enzymes and their respective novel chemistries with biological signals and desirable therapeutic properties.
Pragma Bio has created a hypothesis generating discovery engine called Lattice, which archives and sorts through countless interactions and correlations between natural products and human cells that are linked to clinical outcomes. Biologically significant microbial genes are subsequently manipulated and transferred to the laboratory, utilizing technology to produce and manifest a collection of enzymes and natural chemistries. The company has also established academic and pharmaceutical partnerships with global leaders.