During the SSS Holidays India Vizag 2023, Triple S VC announced its second investment of 2023 in a startup called Denovo Sciences
During the SSS Holidays India Vizag 2023, Triple S VC announced its second investment of 2023 in a startup called Denovo Sciences, which is a deep technology company that creates novel therapeutics using state-of-the-art AI technologies.
The Denovo Platform is a breakthrough technology which allows designing multi-target drugs which can be used to treat complex diseases, infectious diseases and cancer targeting small molecules which can unlock a huge space of drug targets/diseases that were undruggable before. Their technology empowers scientists to work with all targets where little or no dataset is available.
Finding new drugs can take 10 years and 3 bln dollars and in recent years there has been a huge interest from the pharma industry in using AI to find new drug candidates. But if you want to develop a new drug candidate against a new target/disease, usually you don’t have enough data to train your algorithms on. ‘That’s why we have built Denovo’s unique technology that is based on reinforcement learning (a subtype of AI) which is dataset independent and is specifically designed to work with therapeutic targets that have little or no experimental data available’, said Hovakim Zakaryan, co-founder of the startup.
Currently the team is focusing on the development of antiviral drug candidates against Hepatitis B virus, human coronaviruses and influenza viruses. Specifically, there’s no drug against chronic hepatitis B virus and there are 300M people infected. ‘Denovo Sciences have created a novel solution targeting a crucial problem in the drug discovery sector and I am assured that the investment and partnership with Triple S VC will enable them to grow the company and advance their antiviral drug discovery projects’, said Avag Simonyan the Managing Partner of the fund.
Triple S VC is a new venture fund co-founded by Artur Janibekyan, Avag Simonyan and Hakob Hakobyan in 2022 that targets startups in pre-seed and seed-stages.