Promise Bio Emerges From Stealth With 8.3m Seed Investment To Transform Precision Medicine For Immune-mediated Diseases
Promise Bio , a startup transforming immune-mediated disease treatment with advanced precision medicine solutions, today announced its emergence from stealth with an 8.3 million seed investment. This funding will accelerate the development of Promise Bios computational platform, which uses epiproteomics and artificial intelligence to predict patient treatment responses and support drug research and development.
Current biological treatments for autoimmune diseases dont work in all patients, with only 30-40 of patients achieving significant remission. At Promise Bio, our mission is to eliminate the trial-and-error approach by introducing tools for data-driven decisions, said Ronel Veksler , Co-founder CEO of Promise Bio. The key to addressing this challenge lies in focusing on the right biological data-proteins, the building blocks of our body. Its not just about protein levels but understanding the changes they undergo after formation. The PROMISE Protein Modification Integrated Search Engine platform does exactly that, enabling us to get closer to bringing precision medicine to diseases that currently lack effective tools.
Promise Bios innovative platform is rooted in years of foundational research conducted by Dr. Assaf Kacen , Co-Founder CTO of Promise Bio, in the lab of Prof. Yifat Merbl, Scientific Co-Founder of the company, at the Weizmann Institute of Science. The groundbreaking research into protein modifications and immune response, featured in Nature Biotechnology in 2023, laid the foundation for developing Promise Bios computational platform. Dr. Kacen built on this research to create a system that enables broad-scale profiling of dozens of post-translational modifications PTMs from mass-spectrometry data without needing customized chemical enrichment or additional lab procedures.
Determining the change in the protein level or relying on just blood count caused by a complex immune response is like looking at a black-and-white TV screen with poor resolution, said Dr. Assaf Kacen , Co-Founder CTO of Promise Bio . Our platform extracts modifications that occur to the proteins resulting from the disease those specific changes inform us about aberrations in protein function or regulation. Interpreting it with machine learning approaches is like watching a colored TV with an unparalleled high-resolution view of the underlying biology.
The 8.3 million seed investment, led by Awz Ventures, and with funding via AION Labs venture seeding track from AstraZeneca and Pfizer, provides Promise Bio with crucial financial backing to accelerate the development of its platform. This funding, along a grant from the Israel Innovation Authority, strengthens the companys ability to scale its cutting-edge technology and expand its research capabilities.