Over 30% of clinical trials for new drugs fail due to a high toxicity level. Every time a pharmaceutical company develops a new drug, it needs to ensure it is safe for human use. Currently, the initial phase is carried out by toxicologists who manually sift through databases of past clinical trials and provide an expert report, taking up to three weeks.

Each report can cost up to £25k, with some pharmaceutical companies requesting up to 100 reports a year. Small/medium companies especially feel the cost burden of this process.

Finding solutions to tackle manual and expensive processes in drug development is key to powering the next wave of biotech startups.

Sable Bio is a biomedical data platform that leverages AI to provide faster and deeper drug safety insights.

Automate - Reduce the cost and time taken to produce toxicology drug safety reports

Data - Leverage LLMs to generate proprietary datasets and extract data from unstructured trial reports

Insights - Extract deeper insights into the drug development process e.g. biomarker/drug efficacy predictions

Founder

Alex de Giorgio, Co-Founder - Previously Senior Principal Scientist at Benevolent AI. PhD - Biology, Imperial College London

Josh Almond-Thynne, Co-Founder - Previously Senior Principal Scientist at Benevolent AI. PhD - Organic Chemistry, Imperial College London

Spotlight Analysis

Strengths

• Founder-market fit: Strong industry knowledge of drug development at Benevolent AI and previous experience building enterprise software

• Regulatory tailwind: Animal models are getting further penalised which creates a need for alternatives that is largely unmet

• Strong moat: The combination of a proprietary dataset and model provides a high barrier to entry

Weaknesses

• Adoption risk: Companies will be wary of full automation at this stage due to the high cost of failure

• Market demand: Initial wedge of providing a low-cost alternative to manual toxicology reports has yet to be validated

Market

Ignota Labs - Raised undisclosed pre-seed round led by Sustainable Ventures in October 2022

Clarivate - Public company listed on NYSE in September 2018

Key Details

Year founded: 2023

Summary: Sable Bio is a biomedical data platform that leverages AI to provide faster and deeper drug safety insights.

Currently raising: Yes, raising £1.5m

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