With a new raise provided by Flagship Pioneering, the new company is aiming to find “the silent window” before disease symptoms set in.
With a fresh tank filled with $50 million in cash, Flagship Pioneering’s newest biotech Etiome is looking to get ahead of diseases before they even progress into symptoms.
The company is banking on an AI-powered discovery platform it calls Temporal Biodynamics. So named because Etiome is looking to plot what it sees as a more holistic, across-time view of disease progression. The company is spun out of Flagship’s Preemptive Health and Medicine Initiative—“preemptive” because the aim is to develop therapeutics based on biology that occurs in patients’ bodies before symptoms actually appear.
“There’s biology that happens before those major transitions” into symptoms, Etiome co-founder and president Scott Lipnick, also an origination partner at Flagship, told BioSpace in an interview. “That’s ‘the silent stage’.”
“We need something more than just ‘healthy’ or ‘has Alzheimer’s.’ Can we predict who’s going to get sick sooner? We are moving to a continuous representation of biology,” he said.
Etiome is using AI models, trained on datasets from contracted clinical trials and databases like the U.K. Biobank, to create potential biomarkers of disease before it occurs. While the company’s eventual aim is to develop treatments, initially it is focused on research and discovery. The platform in development looks for shifts in gene expression and protein abundance, biological characteristics that can be plotted on an axis of time that marks stages of disease.
That could include measurements like percentage of amyloid-beta or tau burdens in a patient, continuous labels of Alzheimer’s disease that can be tracked over time before symptoms set in, Lipnick said.
Etiome is in discussion with several large biopharmas on development partnerships for any discoveries that turn into therapies, according to Lipnick. The company did not provide any information on potential molecules or modalities for its treatments.
Etiome was founded in 2021, with Lipnick as president and Avak Kahvejian, general partner at Flagship Pioneering, as CEO. “If we didn’t have anything to take action on, we wouldn’t be coming out of stealth,” Lipnick said.
The company has two main research aims: developing biomarkers against the liver, specifically in non-alcoholic fatty liver disease and metabolic dysfunction-associated steatohepatitis (MASH), as well as neurodegeneration in the form of Alzheimer’s. The liver pipeline is currently in the preclinical stage while the Alzheimer’s work is still in vitro. An immune pipeline is currently “being seeded” as Lipnick put it.
While AI is in the headline, Lipnick doesn’t want the concept of artificial intelligence to be front and center.
“AI is the tool that is giving us the belief that we can do this, but it is not the protagonist. Our focus is: how do people actually benefit from drugs we develop? And if we can figure that out, how can we stop diseases before they become irreversible?”
