HARMONIC DISCOVERY LAUNCHES WITH $8 MILLION IN SEED TO DEVELOP A NEW GENERATION OF MULTI-TARGET KINASE INHIBITORS

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Sep 08, 2022, 08:00 ET

With Round Led by Innovation Endeavors & Dr. Joel Dudley as New Board Member, Company to Advance Development of Preclinical Drug Candidates in Oncology

NEW YORK, Sept. 8, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- Harmonic Discovery, a therapeutics company building an integrated computational and experimental platform for kinase drug discovery and targeted polypharmacology, announces its launch today with $8 million in seed funding. The round was led by Innovation Endeavors with participation from Fifty Years, Y Combinator, Boom Capital, Caffeinated Capital and select angel investors. Dr. Joel Dudley, PhD, Partner at Innovation Endeavors, joins as a new Board Member.

Many drugs exert their effect through multiple modes of action which is a well-established phenomenon known as polypharmacology. Yet, the pharmaceutical industry has historically focused on finding "magic bullets", or drugs optimized to engage specific single targets. Harmonic Discovery's fully integrated kinase drug discovery platform aims to challenge this paradigm.

Co-founders Rayees Rahman, PhD, Jason Lee, MD, and Marcel Patek, PhD are building a machine learning-first infrastructure that integrates several aspects of kinase drug discovery. The company's models learn from the topology of atoms and bonds that make up a kinase drug, to the three-dimensional ins and outs of kinase structure, all the way up to the dynamic cellular environments of disease driven by kinases. By spanning multiple disciplines, including systems biology, cheminformatics, medicinal chemistry, and machine learning, the company believes it can develop novel therapies across diseases such as cancer and autoimmune disorders.

"There is an enormous opportunity to create safer and more effective drugs. We passionately believe that our unified approach to kinase drug discovery will be the first step in unlocking completely new ways to treat diseases. We're thrilled to have Joel and the team at Innovation Endeavors on board to help us embrace our vision for the future of therapeutics," said Rayees Rahman, PhD, Harmonic Discovery's CEO and Co-Founder.

"The co-founders at Harmonic Discovery have exceptional and complementary expertise across machine learning, medicinal chemistry and biotechnology business development to address the untapped potential of kinase drugs. The strength of their computational platform and methodology is a breakthrough in the industry. Their machine learning models and computational approaches are extremely precise and have been validated experimentally," said Joel Dudley, PhD and Partner at Innovation Endeavors. Dr. Dudley was previously the Chief Scientific Officer at Tempus and Associate Professor of Genetics and Genomic Sciences at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai.

With this new funding, Harmonic Discovery plans to advance its drug discovery platform and pipeline by expanding its leadership team, building proprietary chemical libraries, and scaling its laboratory operations.

Harmonic Discovery is a resident of JLABS @ NYC, part of Johnson & Johnson Innovation's global network of life science incubators. Harmonic Discovery's Scientific Advisory Board includes Drs. Olivier Elemento, PhD, Professor of Systems Biology at Weill Cornell College of Medicine, Omar Abel-Wahab, MD, Director of the Memorial Sloan Kettering Center for Hematologic Malignancies, Tero Aittokallio, PhD, Professor of Computational Biology at the University of Oslo, and Andreas Bender, PhD, Professor of Chemoinformatics, Cambridge University and CSO of Terra Lumia.

About Harmonic Discovery

Founded in 2021 and headquartered in New York City, Harmonic Discovery is a therapeutics company building an integrated computational and experimental platform for kinase drug discovery and targeted polypharmacology. The company's platform leverages multiple layers of kinase biology to design safer and more efficacious kinase therapeutics. It has raised $8 million in funding from Innovation Endeavors, Fifty Years, Y Combinator, Boom Capital, Caffeinated Capital and select angel investors. To learn more, visit https://www.harmonicdiscovery.com/

About Innovation Endeavors

Innovation Endeavors is an early-stage venture capital firm that invests in mission-driven founders, transformational technologies, and emergent ecosystems for a new world. The firm's central investment thesis, the Super Evolution, combines data, leading-edge computation, and advanced engineering to transform a range of industries, including agriculture, supply chain, the life sciences, transportation, and more. Its investments include AlphaSense, Astra, Color, Blue River Technology, Eikon Therapeutics, Fabric, Formlabs, Freenome, Planet, Rebellion Defense, Replica, SoFi, Uber, Upstart, Vicarious Surgical, and more.