USA – Vilya, Inc., a Seattle, WA-based biotechnology company creating a new class of medicines that precisely target disease biology, launched with $50m in Series A financing.
The round was led by ARCH Venture Partners. The company’s proprietary platform, powered by advanced machine learning, taps into uncharted chemical space to design de novo molecular structures that range in size between small molecules and antibodies, with critical drug-like properties, including the ability to move through biological membranes and to disrupt protein-protein interactions while being highly selective for their protein target. These novel artificial molecules with customized biologic-like properties can be leveraged for previously difficult-to-drug therapeutic targets in a broad set of indications.Vilya’s computational design platform leverages advanced machine learning and other computational approaches to explore an exponentially larger chemical space and design desired drug properties. These capabilities position the company to precisely target disease biology. Vilya’s co-founding team includes David Baker, Gaurav Bhardwaj, Lance Stewart, Patrick Salveson, Adam Moyer, and Naozumi Hiranuma, from the UW Medicine Institute for Protein Design and Robert Nelsen, Steven Gillis, Olivia Zetter, Inca Dieterich, and Sabah Oney, from ARCH Venture Partners.29/08/2022
