Follow the Money: AI Drug Treatments, Stocks, Quantum Metabolic Polarizers, More

June 27, 2023 | Leveraging AI for drug treatments, stock investments, revolutionizing metabolic MRIs with polarizers, and more. 

$250M: AI Drug Discovery Collaboration 

XtalPi Inc. announced an AI drug discovery collaboration of up to $250 million in upfront and milestone payments with Eli Lilly and Company. The collaboration will leverage XtalPi's integrated AI capabilities and robotics platform to de novo design and deliver drug candidates for an undisclosed target. XtalPi will work closely with the Lilly team to harness the power of its proven one-stop AI drug discovery solution to deliver a novel compound, which Lilly will pursue in clinical and commercial development. 

$40M: Stock Shares Offer New Developments for Research 

Clene announced the pricing of an underwritten public offering of (i) 50,000,000 shares of its common stock and (ii) two tranches of warrants (each warrant to purchase one share of common stock). The combined offering price to the public of each share of common stock and accompanying warrant is $0.80. All of the shares of common stock and accompanying warrants are being offered by Clene. The shares of common stock and the accompanying warrants will be issued separately but can only be purchased together in the offering. Before deducting the underwriting discounts and commissions and other offering expenses, Clene expects to receive total gross proceeds of approximately $40 million. The offering is expected to close on or about June 21, 2023, subject to the satisfaction of customary closing conditions. Canaccord Genuity is acting as the sole bookrunner in the offering. Maxim Group LLC and EF Hutton, a division of Benchmark Investments, LLC, are acting as co-managers in the offering. Clene intends to use the net proceeds from this offering, together with its existing cash, for expenses primarily related to general corporate purposes, including to fund the clinical development of our lead drug candidate, CNM-Au8, including the conduct of our on-going and planned clinical trials, potential future commercialization efforts, and future regulatory activities including preparation of regulatory filings; and for additional early-stage research and development activities; and other general corporate purposes. 

$30M: Series A for Metabolic MRI  

NVision Imaging announced that they have closed a $30M Series A round, with an additional $19.5M in funding from the German government. The company will use the funds to advance the development and deployment of the NVision Polarizer and usher in a new era of metabolic MRI capabilities and ultimately, adaptive cancer treatment. The round was led by Playground Global, with participation by return investors b-to-v and new participation from Pathena Investments, Entree Capital, Lauder Family, ES Kapital, and Ulm Kapital, bringing their total funding to $35M, not including the government funds. NVision’s Polarizer is based on a novel parahydrogen-induced polarization (PHIP) technique. The NVision team is applying breakthroughs in quantum physics, chemistry, and engineering to revolutionize metabolic MRIs. NVision’s quantum metabolic polarizers are currently planned for preclinical use in 2023, and will use the funding to deploy their technology for human care in the coming years. 

$20 million: Series B for Healthcare Conversational AI  

Hyro announced that it has finalized a $20 million Series B funding round led by Macquarie Capital, with participation from new investors Liberty Mutual Strategic Ventures, Black Opal Ventures, and K20, as well as existing investors Hanaco Ventures, Spero Ventures, and Mindset Ventures—bringing the company’s total funding to $35 million. With this capital raise, Hyro plans to hire top talent across all departments as it continues to build out its no-code platform for AI-powered call center, web, and mobile solutions, while also expanding strategic partnerships, integrations, and use cases across healthcare and other key industries where it is already experiencing strong traction. Hyro anticipates that the funding round, coupled with the surge in popularity of OpenAI’s ChatGPT, Google’s Bard and other large language model (LLM) applications, will catalyze another fiscal year of doubled growth in these categories. 

$7 million: Pre-Series A for Wearable Diagnostics 

Nutromics has raised $7M in an acceleration round for its medical wearable diagnostic platform. The round was oversubscribed and led by two high net-worth family offices. This places the company in a position of strength leading into its upcoming series A round, expected to open later in 2023.  This latest funding comes after Nutromics raised $13M in 2022 in a round led by Dexcom Ventures. Dexcom is a leading Continuous Glucose Monitor manufacturer, with a market cap of $44B. Since the last raise, the company has made rapid advancements on its journey to commercialising its diagnostic patch. Nutromics hopes to emulate the success of other Australian MedTech companies such as Cochlear (market cap US$11B) and ResMed (market cap US$29B). Nutromics’ first in-human studies are currently underway at Monash Health in Australia. The company plans to open its $30M+ Series A funding round with global venture firms later in 2023.    

$5.5 million: Series A Addition for Biology Simulation 

Turbine has added €5.5 million from MassMutual Ventures (MMV) to its recently closed Series A financing round. This investment brings the company’s oversubscribed Series A round to €25.5 million and adds further U.S.-based investors to the company’s financing syndicate. The latest funding will be used to advance Turbine’s internal pipeline of simulation-guided programs, while scaling its biology simulation platform to support additional partnerships. Turbine’s simulations can represent patient populations that existing biological models cannot. They also have the capacity to perform assays that would be impractical to conduct at scale and with high throughput. A proprietary closed-loop learning process validates promising hypotheses in Turbine’s in vitro and in vivo assays, leading to a constantly evolving model of cancer biology. The result is an innovation engine that continues to reveal novel targets, biomarkers and drug combinations that have been experimentally validated and are often missed by existing methods such as CRISPR. Clinically, these targets have been associated with patient populations with high unmet need. 

$1.6 million: Advancing Vaccine Storage 

The Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness (CEPI) and aVaxziPen Ltd announced a partnership to advance the development of two vaccines candidates (one protein and one mRNA-based) using aVaxziPen’s solid dose vaccine-delivery platform, which could help end the need for frozen storage of vaccines, thereby improving equitable access to vaccines. CEPI will initially provide up to $1.6 million to establish proof-of-concept for aVaxziPen’s vaccine-delivery technology by evaluating stability, delivery and preclinical immunogenicity of both mRNA and protein-based vaccines developed using aVaxziPen’s platform.