Transition Bio, a drug-discovery startup with roots in Cambridge, England, and Cambridge, Mass., has raised $13.3 million in a new funding round. So far, the firm has raised a total of $69.3 million from investors including Bethesda, Md.-based Northpond Ventures, New York’s Bristol Myers Squibb and West Coast firms Lifeforce Capital, Taiho Ventures and San Magnetic Ventures.
The birth of Transition Bio is a culmination of decades-long research by Profs. David Weitz of Harvard University and Tuomas Knowles of the University of Cambridge. Two other academicians later joined the Transition Bio founding team. Both are from the University of Cambridge: Peter St George-Hyslop, a professor of experimental neuroscience and “one of the most cited authors in field of Alzheimer’s” research; and Sarah Teichmann, director of research at the Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge, and co-founder and co-leader of the global Human Cell Atlas initiative.
The startup focuses on so-called condensates — membraneless organelles that are key to cellular mechanisms — to identify and design drugs to treat cancer and neurological disorders. Transition Bio brings latest advancements in physics, chemistry, biology and machine learning, and integrates them to address health challenges.
“After nearly 15 years of supporting each other’s work from an academic point of view, it is extremely exciting to combine the distinctive capabilities of our respective labs,” Weitz said after Transition Bio emerged with seed funding in 2020. “It is our strong belief that this area of liquid-liquid phase separation offers an amazing opportunity in human health care advancement.”
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“David and I have long discussed how we could merge our knowledge and technologies to create something substantial that could genuinely change the world,” Knowles said. “The combination of unique physical science methods with microfluidics and ‘big data’ allows for disruptive advances in the world of drug discovery and diagnostics.”
Transition Bio has developed a novel platform it calls Condensomics that utilizes microfluidics to drive “high-throughput generation of proprietary data to enable machine learning-guided condensate target identification and drug discovery.”
Northpond Ventures, which focuses heavily on scientific startups, has long engaged with condensate biology. Its portfolio companies include Aro Biotherapeutics, Code Bio and Eleanor Health.
