XtalPi Invests in Phoremost's $46M Series B Financing

(VCBeat) Mar. 24, 2021 -- XtalPi, an AI-based drug discovery company that aims to drive drug innovation by digitization and intelligence, announced that it has invested in Phoremost, a British biopharmaceutical company that "challenges unachievable drug targets". This Series B round with total financing of $46 million was led by BGF with participation from a number of new and existing investors including XtalPi. Dr. Yide Chiang, Chief Strategy Officer of XtalPi, will join Phoremost's board of directors.

The new funds raised will be used to advance Phoremost's proprietary and collaborative pipelines in the treatment of cancer and aging diseases, as well as to develop new therapies based on targeted protein degradation through its phenotypic screening platform. An alloster-based pipeline of PLK1 for brain cancer is expected to enter clinical trials in 2022.

XtalPi’s participation in the latest round is based on the successful collaboration and deep understanding between the two companies. In 2020, XtalPi and Phoremost jointly launched a new drug discovery program to deal with Phoremost's selected "non-prescriptable" tumor targets with XtalPi's AI-powered R&D platform. In this collaboration, XtalPi customizes the super-large chemical space of drugs for Phoremost's new targets using the ID4 (Intelligent Digital Drug Discovery and Development) Drug Discovery platform, combining machine learning and quantum physics algorithms to screen, evaluate, and rapidly develops high-quality candidates for a variety of cancers.

This strategic investment in Phoremost will further deepen the cooperation between the two companies and apply the combined R&D model to a wider range of diseases.

XtalPi is a pharmaceutical technology company that is reinventing the industry’s approach to drug research and development with its Intelligent Digital Drug Discovery and Development (ID4) platform.

With tightly interwoven quantum physics, AI, and high-performance cloud computing algorithms, XtalPi's ID4 platform provides accurate predictions on the physicochemical and pharmaceutical properties of small-molecule candidates for drug design, solid-form selection, and other critical aspects of drug development.