Phare Bio’s $27M Funding Will Use AI to Tackle Antimicrobial Resistance
The UN forecasts that drug-resistant diseases could cause 10 million deaths each year by 2050. | Credit: Christopher Furlong / Getty Images.
Key Takeaways
- Phare Bio has been awarded $27 million in funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).
- The biotech startup will use the money to advance its antibiotic discovery initiative.
- Using AI, the company intends to introduce 15 new drugs into the preclinical pipeline.
Phare Bio, a Boston-based biotech company, has been awarded $27 million in funding from the Advanced Research Projects Agency for Health (ARPA-H).
The funds will boost Phare Bio’s efforts in tackling one of the most pressing global health crises: antimicrobial resistance (AMR). By using cutting-edge artificial intelligence (AI), Phare Bio aims to revolutionize how new antibiotics are discovered and developed.
AI-Driven Drug Discovery
Drug discovery was one of the first widespread commercial applications of machine learning, which is used to analyze chemical structures, biological interactions and patient data to identify potential new drugs and predict their efficacy.
The first fully AI-generated drugs have already reached late-stage clinical trials, and researchers are using the technology to create new treatments for diseases like Alzheimers.
Using new AI techniques, Phare Bio is trying to discover novel antibiotics that can work on microbes that have evolved resistance to penicillin and other classic antibiotics.
The new funding will be used to introduce candidate drugs into the preclinical pipeline and create the first open-source database for AI-based antibiotic discovery, the startup said in a news release .
Addressing a Global Crisis
Unless new antibiotics are developed, the UN forecasts that drug-resistant diseases could cause 10 million deaths each year by 2050.
One of the primary concerns is drug-resistant tuberculosis, which killed an estimated 1.3 million people in 2022. Multidrug-resistant tuberculosis strains are increasingly difficult to treat, with fewer effective antibiotics available.
Similarly, gonorrhea has developed resistance to almost all existing antibiotics, making it harder to treat and control its spread.
Other critical infections affected by AMR include pneumonia and sepsis. Alarmingly, some strains of E. coli and Klebsiella bacteria are even becoming resistant to Carbapenems, a class of antibiotic agents typically reserved for multidrug-resistant bacterial infections.
Phare Bio’s Open-Source Approach
With ARPA-H’s backing and its ambitious plan to develop 15 candidate antibiotics, Phare Bio could breathe new life into a field that has seen limited breakthroughs in recent years.
In addition to its own drug discovery pipeline, the startup will share its datasets in an open-source database for AI-based antibiotic discovery.
By making the tools available to other researchers, the startup hopes to galvanize the further development of new antibiotics.
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