Signs on Eight Pharmaceutical Partners and Completes First Preclinical Study from Immune Organoid Platform with Centivax
CAMBRIDGE, Mass., June 12, 2025 – Parallel Bio, a biotech company pioneering human-first drug discovery, today announced it has raised $21 million Series A funding, led by AIX Ventures. The round attracted prominent leaders in AI and biotech, including new investors Amplo and Marc Benioff, founder and CEO of Salesforce, and existing investors Metaplanet, Humba Ventures, Atypical Ventures, Undeterred Capital, and Jeff Dean.
The company also revealed that 8
pharmaceutical partners, including three Fortune 500 companies, are testing
more than 50 drugs and immunotherapies using its organoid-based immune system
platform—including Centivax, which completed the first preclinical testing on
the platform for its universal flu vaccine candidate.
“With these milestones, we are closer to
making human-first drug discovery the new industry standard,” said Robert
DiFazio, CEO and co-founder at Parallel Bio. “For too long, the reliance on lab
mice to model human biology has come at a high cost: 95% of drugs fail in human
trials even after succeeding in animal studies. We’re turning that on its head
by using organoids and AI to discover drugs in true-to-life human models from
the start.”
Parallel Bio will use the new capital to
scale the AI and automation capabilities of its organoid-based immune system
platform, expand its team of scientists and engineers, and support growing
pharmaceutical partnerships. To date, Parallel Bio has raised a total of nearly
$30 million, including this Series A and previous seed rounds.
Parallel Bio’s platform
combines lymph-node organoids with AI and robotics to
replicate the human immune system at scale across diverse populations. Organoids are 3D, self-assembling models of human
biology. These miniature organs mimic an organ’s structure and function and the
body’s response to disease or treatment, as if the organoids were individual
patients.
AIX Ventures partner Krish Ramadurai, who
joined the company’s board of directors as part of the round, commented: “Parallel Bio is redefining drug development by turning
the conventional model upside down—transforming today’s 95% failure rate into a
pathway for 95% success. Their groundbreaking human-first platform unlocks
biological insights previously impossible to capture, accelerating the
development of effective treatments that reach patients faster while generating
de novo biological data to power the next generation of AI-driven therapeutics.
We're thrilled to partner with the Parallel Bio team in setting a new gold
standard for the future of medicine.”
Since launching Clinical Trial in a Dish
last year, Parallel Bio has seen growing demand from pharmaceutical companies. This
first commercial application accurately predicts the safest and most effective
drug candidates for human trials.
“Starting with human models enables new
drugs to reach the market at a pace never possible before,” said Juliana
Hilliard, Parallel Bio co-founder and chief scientific officer. “We aim to
slash $2 billion and 9 years from each drug candidate in development by
predicting success at the earliest stages of discovery.”
Centivax Validates Broad Immune Response
in Organoid Trial Parallel Bio partnered with Centivax, a
universal immunity biotechnology company, to generate human-first data to
validate Centivax’s first program: a universal flu vaccine called Centi-Flu
that is now in manufacturing for human clinical
trials, with the first patient expected to be dosed early next year. "Parallel Bio
enables us to derisk the single biggest source of failure in vaccine
development: making sure the vaccines work in humans before the human trials
have even begun,” said Jacob Glanville, president and CEO at Centivax. “Even
though we have validated our pan-influenza responses in mice, rats, pigs, and
ferrets, ultimately we are making a universal vaccine for humans. Parallel
Bio’s platform is transformative by allowing us to directly validate our
results in immune organoids derived from adult humans.” The organoid study revealed the power of
the Centi-Flu technology: by effectively targeting common features of the virus
shared by many different influenza strains, Centi-Flu even produces strong
immune responses against strains not included in the vaccine. Human immune
organoids were “vaccinated” with Centi-Flu, leading to the production of B
cells capable of reacting to a wide variety of flu strains. The immune
organoids were derived from patients with prior flu exposure, proving that
Centi-Flu could trigger broad humoral responses in flu-exposed individuals. The organoid model also showed activation
of CD4+ and CD8+ T cells, which are important for fighting infections,
suggesting that Centi-Flu helps stimulate both antibody production and T cell immunity.
This combination is particularly valuable for protecting against severe flu,
including hospitalization and death.
About Parallel Bio Parallel Bio is pioneering human-first
drug discovery by combining organoids and AI to create true-to-life models of
human biology. The company developed the first platform that replicates the
human immune system across diverse populations, predicting drug success and
identifying disease targets with accuracy and speed far beyond the limits of
traditional animal models. Pharmaceutical partners, including three Fortune 500
companies, are using its Clinical Trial in a Dish to test the safety and
efficacy of immunotherapies. Based
in Cambridge, Mass., Parallel Bio was founded in 2021 by two scientists behind
the world’s first scalable human immune organoid.
Contacts:
Media
contact Matt Hicks
Business
contact Robert
DiFazio
