Kumuda

Kumuda’s drug discovery platform identifies and accelerates development of multiple novel drugs addressing high value clinical needs

Kumuda has fully analyzed the human genome and broad compound library and now has hundreds of promising assets waiting to be characterized, optimized and developed. Kumuda has identified 200 top drug targets for which a safe and effective small molecule would have high clinical value and actively pursuing academic and bioindustry design partnerships to collaboratively fund and develop.

Kumuda’s platform will help any company or institution doing drug discovery R&D efficiently identify, prioritize and develop successful drugs to address new disease targets. The size of this opportunity for small molecule drug discovery R&D is around 9 BILLION dollars for the serviceable obtainable market—at conservative estimates.

Drug discovery is highly inefficient and current drugs only address ~1-2% of the human genome. In addition, finding new, successful drugs has become so much harder. The average cost of bringing one to market is $2.6B, nearly doubled between 2003 and 2013.
There is an urgent need to rapidly discover and develop new disease target drugs. For a biological target to be successfully drugged and cause a therapeutic effect, it must 1) be important for the disease and 2) be actionable, with the potential to bind to a drug—known as druggability. Most companies only focus on disease-modifying targets. Kumuda instead holistically analyzes solutions to include disease biology, target druggability and compound chemistry

Kumuda effectively leverages the wealth of large-scale orthogonal and multifaceted data sets available to generate actionable insights for drug discovery and comprehensively assess a target’s potential to be drugged. This includes analysis of over 4 million bioactivities, ~16,000 crystal structures and over 12,500 protein interactions. Kumuda’s methodology has not only identified hundreds of first-in-class small molecule drug target families, but has repeatedly accelerated the time and cost to clinic across a range of diseases. With current estimates, we have reduced drug discovery timelines and costs: from 14 years to 6 years and $2.6B to $33M.

For a biological target to be successfully drugged and cause a therapeutic effect it must 1) be important for the disease and 2) be actionable, with the potential to bind to a drug—a feature known as druggability. Most companies focus on whether a target is disease-modifying (1). Kumuda is world-class at druggability (2) and focusing on solutions from the outset.

Kumuda’s unique methodology effectively integrates more modalities of large-scale data to identify synergies, eliminate hurdles and optimize drug development programs. The algorithm outperforms competitors at druggable genome assessment and has a proven track record of efficiently advancing successful novel drugs towards the clinic.

Because finding new, successful drugs has become so much harder, the average cost of bringing one to market nearly doubled between 2003 and 2013. As a result, the pharma industry is enthusiastic about artificial-intelligence tools for drug development. There are a number of small molecule data-driven software-based companies; for example, Valo, Atomwise, Benevolent AI & Exscientia.

Kumuda outperforms competitors and field at predicting small molecule drug targets. Kumuda’s team has a number of superpowers (1) We have world class expertise in druggability. (2) We have a proven track record of discovering promising drugs advancing towards the clinic. To highlight a few achievements of our technology, we have a novel clinical candidate for colorectal cancer discovered with Institute for Cancer Research; we brought a drug to clinic 3x faster with biotech company Exscientia and Sumitomo Dainippon; Evotec has invested $15M behind the platform output; and we filed provisional patent treating COVID-19. Kumuda has fully analyzed the human genome and broad company library and now has hundreds of promising assets waiting to be characterized, optimized, and developed (3) Our “constellation” of labs and partners enables us to commercialize many therapeutic candidates as efficiently as possible, at a fraction of the cost and time, in comparison to our competitors.

In Phase 1, Kumuda will begin with an asset-led approach of suggested biological targets and lead drug candidates that are complementary to potential pharma customers current disease portfolios. An asset-led approach (1) builds upon the founder’s strong expertise and track record of discovering and developing successful clinical candidates, (2) informs us on the critical decision makers and processes within a company for development or uptake of a new drug or platform, (3) peaks initial interest by speaking a familiar language of molecules and targets to our customers, (4) instills confidence that our software platform actually can achieve its claims and helps us to rise above the noise of other AI software companies, and (5) will help inform features to be developed for the platform moving forward. In Phase 2, we can convert these early customers into design partners for our computational platform who want to expand this approach to the rest of their portfolio, which will hopefully subsequently instill confidence in other companies to implement our platform. In Phase 3, a computational platform will be necessary to scale and realize the full potential of Kumuda’s application for drug discovery across several diseases. We ultimately envision a pay per service business model plus royalties (~2%). In terms of the market, the size of this opportunity is huge, with a conservative estimate for small molecule drugs of around 9 billion dollars for the serviceable obtainable market.

See business model details above.

Money will be spending on filing patents for lead drug candidates and completing in vitro experiments for the validation packages. In addition, the associated team salaries and legal fees associated with patent and deal partnership contract consultations.

Terms: SAFE (Simple Agreement for Future Equity) with a $5M valuation cap and 80% discount rate, for 5% of common stock equity investment.

The Kumuda algorithm is fully functional and operational. Kumuda is focusing on acquiring deal partnerships with pharma/biotech as an immediate source of income. We are currently in a number of conversations with said organizations and the income will be able (1) to validate our technology and methodology further and (2) to fund development of our prioritized therapeutics within Kumuda's constellation. The risk is that we are not successful in acquiring customers to fund this phase.

Kumuda took part in Techstars Boston 2020 Accelerator and is now in ActivateBio Life Science Entrepreneurship program 2021.

Provisional for leading drug candidate treating COVID-19. Currently working on filing patents for prioritized drug candidates that Kumuda will develop in-house as a therapeutic company.