CAMBRIDGE, Massachusetts— to harness the human body’s power to cure disease, Parallel Bio announced USD 4.3 million in seed funding. The investment capital has allowed it to demonstrate the viability of its immune-system-in-a-dish platform and accelerate drug discovery and development. Refactor Capital led the seed round, with participation from Breakout Ventures, SVP of Google AI, Jeff Dean, Y Combinator, several biotech-focused funds, and senior executives from global pharmaceutical companies.
Parallel Bio co-founder and CEO Robert DiFazio:
“Nearly 95 percent of drugs that make it to clinical trials fail, even when they first work on animals. With this funding, we’ve been able to turn failure into an opportunity to cure the disease at a never-before-seen pace by focusing first on human systems.”
Organoids, also known as “mini-organs,” is 3D, self-assembling models of human biology. They mimic the structure and function of human body parts and their responses to disease or treatment as if the organoids were individual patients. Parallel Bio’s platform combines immune organoids, artificial intelligence, and robotics to represent organoids as a population in a novel way. Its platform is the first of its kind to model entire populations’ immune systems. It is the only resistant technology with the required complexity and scale to turn 95 percent failure into 95 percent success.
Parallel Bio achieved significant scientific and commercial milestones this year, allowing it to bring its immune platform to pharmaceutical and biotechnology partners. It comes as regulatory changes are poised to increase interest in non-animal methods for drug development following the passage of legislation by the United States Senate that eliminates the requirement for animal testing before clinical trials.
“Parallel Bio has the right vision and technology to cure disease entirely through the human body,” said Zal Bilimoria, Refactor Capital’s founding partner. “It is building a new drug discovery and development platform that upends a century-old reliance on animal testing. Parallel Bio’s approach promises to save billions of dollars in waste and years of additional drug development time.
More about the startup:
Parallel Bio harnesses the power of the human body to heal itself. It created the first drug discovery and development platform that very well replicates the human immune system in a dish. It more realistically and accurately models human disease than animal testing, resulting in the shortest path to treatments and cures that work for more people. The platform, which combines immune organoids, machine learning, and robotics, represents the complexity of the disease and the diversity of patients at the population level. The company, based in Cambridge, Massachusetts, was founded in 2021 by two scientists responsible for developing the world’s first scalable human immune organoid.
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