The author of the seminal cancer biography The Emperor Of All Maladies and the co-founder of LinkedIn are looking to connect their skills to the development of new medicines by launching a new artificial intelligence-driven drug discovery outfit.
Siddhartha Mukherjee and Reid Hoffman’s Manas AI aims to help design and screen molecules that could be used against cancer, with plans to employ both computer-aided design and wet-lab biology.
Mukherjee, the Pulitzer prize-winning oncologist who has also written treatises on genetic and cellular research, will serve as Manas’ CEO. Hoffman, who was once a founding board member and executive VP at PayPal, has also sat on the board of Microsoft since its acquisition of LinkedIn. The tech giant is also contributing its Azure cloud-computing platform to Manas’ efforts.
“Throughout our careers, we have always seen technological innovation as one of humanity's best levers for improving human flourishing at scale. In the domain of health care, we can now help the world's best drug development scientists to augment and amplify their expertise using AI,” Mukherjee and Hoffman wrote in an introductory blog post.
“Like many of you, we’ve both had people close to us affected by cancer and other diseases. When we first discussed creating Manas we shared a vision of a future where breakthrough treatments don't take decades to develop,” they wrote. “We're starting with a focus on aggressive cancers like triple-negative breast cancer, prostate cancer, and lymphoma, but our ambitions extend far beyond.”
To get underway, Manas has raised $24.6 million in seed funding, with backing from General Catalyst, Greylock and Hoffman himself.
The startup has also assembled a scientific advisory board that includes multiple winners of some of the most prestigious prizes in biomedical research, plus members of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine and former biopharma company leaders. That includes Nobel laureate Craig Mello, of UMass Chan Medical School; Harvard University’s Lew Cantley and Matthew Shair; Yale University’s William Jorgensen and David Spiegel; Stanford University’s Peter Kim; and Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center’s Gary Gilliland.
“As a former CEO in the biopharma industry, I'm very familiar with the challenges of the highly complex and resource-intensive therapeutic discovery model,” said Merck’s former chairman and chief, Ken Frazier, who now chairs health assurance initiatives at General Catalyst. “Manas AI has the potential to compress the timeline to discovery of effective drug candidates while increasing the likelihood of success in clinical trials.”
Beyond operating as a full-stack AI company, Manas will also pursue Project Cosmos, which aims to chart out the fundamental rules of how drug molecules bind with and influence their biological targets.
“This is exactly the kind of ambitious, transformative project that becomes possible when you bring together the right mix of human expertise and artificial intelligence,” wrote Mukherjee and Hoffman.
“We believe this approach can shift drug discovery from a decade-long process to one that takes a few years; bringing life-saving treatments to patients years faster than ever before. Every day saved in drug discovery is a day closer to helping someone fighting cancer or living with a rare disease,” they wrote. “By combining human intuition with AI's pattern-recognition capabilities, we're not just making drug discovery faster—we're making it smarter and more likely to succeed.”