Octant Raises $30M in Series A Financing

Octant, an Emeryville, Calif.-based synthetic biology drug discovery company designing small molecule, multi-target drug leads for multifactorial diseases, raised $30m in Series A financing.

The round was led by Andreessen Horowitz with participation from 8VC, SV Angel, Allen & Co.

The company intends to use the funds to further develop its discovery platform, which targets large numbers of G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs) and their downstream signaling pathways to engineer drugs to treat complex diseases.

Dr. Sri Kosuri, co-founder and chief executive officer of Octant (Photo: Penelope Jennings)
Dr. Sri Kosuri, co-founder and chief executive officer of Octant (Photo: Penelope Jennings)

Led by Sri Kosuri, ScD, co-founder and CEO, and Ramsey Homsany, president, Octant is a synthetic-biology drug discovery company designing multi-target drug leads for multifactorial diseases. The company engineers biology, using living cells as high-throughput data networks to map, measure and model compound reactions against GPCRs and the entire universe of human receptors. Its novel polypharmacology discovery engine generates multi-receptor pathway data and predictive insights to inform rational drug design with scale and precision.

Octant’s scientific advisory board includes:

  • Charles S. Zuker, PhD, HHMI professor of biochemistry and molecular biophysics, and neuroscience, at Columbia University Medical Center and
  • Vijay Pande, PhD, general partner at Andreessen Horowitz and former Henry Dreyfus professor of chemistry and professor of structural biology and computer science at Stanford University.

FinSMEs

21/05/2020

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