There’s a newly minted Canadian AI unicorn in town, but its business case is a little different than your typical LLM-provider.
What happened: Toronto-based Biossil raised a US$153 million funding round led by none other than OpenAI, achieving a $1 billion valuation in the process. The all-equity deal will be used to expand Biossil’s clinical development capacity and to purchase drug candidates.
Catch-up: Biossil is the biotech equivalent of a carpenter who snags furniture off the trash heap and refurbishes it. The company uses OpenAI models to sift through drug candidates that failed in late-stage clinical trials and pick ones that show the potential to be repurposed.
Its algorithms look for promising molecules and for gaps in the trials that may have resulted in the candidate’s failure (e.g., the trial design pursued the wrong outcome).
The company has bought or licensed 12 molecules thus far — most recently spending $500,000 on an antibiotic in July — and has two drugs in advanced trials.
Why it matters: As public opinion about AI has soured, expect to see an influx of announcements like this as companies try to replace the ‘our product will end humanity’ line of argument with a much more optimistic ‘our product will cure all diseases’ slant. The upshot is that (fingers crossed) we might actually see some pharmaceutical breakthroughs.
Zoom out: This month, Anthropic announced its Claude-powered drug lab. The company is already hyping up its first discovery (and making bold claims about curing Alzheimer's).—QH
