Whether you’re a technology optimist or not, you have to recognize that progress rarely follows a straight line. While the world continues to get better at churning out semiconductors, we’re still struggling to find new drugs to treat resistant diseases, and the process isn’t getting any cheaper.
Some hope AI can help, and it probably will—when it comes to biotech, it’s much more than a buzzword. But Boston-based drug discovery startup Pepper Bio has fallen in love with another term: Transomics. Calling itself “the world’s first transomics company,” it hopes this approach will bring solutions for those suffering from untreated diseases, such as some forms of cancer.
“Today, drug development requires an average of 10-15 years of R&D with production costs (about $2.5 billion) rising dramatically over the past decade despite improvements in technology. the concept of Eroom’s law (Moore’s Law spelled backwards),” VC tech Florian Denis wrote in a recent Medium post.
While AI could help uncover new drugs, “AI analysis is really only as good as the data you put into it,” Pepper Bio CEO Jon Hu told me. And transomics is part of that data.
Transomics may be an emerging term, but the COVID-19 pandemic has made us more familiar with some of the layers involved. “There are currently four different types of omics that we work with: DNA, RNA, proteomic data and phosphoproteomic data,” said Pepper Bio Chief Scientist Samantha Dale Strasser.
You may have recognized the first two as genomic and transcriptional. As for the latter, phosphoproteomics, he summed it up as “proteins with molecular switches added that turn them on and off.”
However, more than any layer on its own, what matters to Pepper Bio is having the full picture. This is also why he prefers to talk about transsomes than for multi-omics, which he considers too disconnected. and why it compares to Google Maps. Just as real-time navigation data is richer and therefore much more useful than static maps, Pepper Bio “brings the same types of advances to drug discovery—a context of routing activity,” Dale Strasser said.
Pharmaceutical applications
The road to drug discovery is particularly difficult to navigate. one study shared by Pepper Bio refers to “an overall drug development failure rate of over 96%, including a 90% failure rate during clinical development.”
If transomics can improve the chances of success before the expensive clinical trial phase begins, pharmaceutical giants will likely be interested—and Pepper Bio is already on their radar.
The biotech startup’s $6.5 million seed round is led by NFX, a VC firm that already participated in its 2021 pre-seed round and was also an early backer of Mammoth Biosciences. But it’s perhaps just as notable to see that Merck is also participating in the round, along with Silverton Partners, Mana Ventures, Tensility Ventures and VSC Ventures.
The pharmaceutical company’s participation comes through the Merck Digital Sciences Studio, an initiative that aims to help start-ups in the healthcare sector bring their innovations to market. This may be just the buffer Pepper Bio needs to be able to work with other partners without worry on their part.
The Merck accelerator, Hu explained, “is basically a forum where we can have a lot of in-depth conversations with Merck scientists to basically understand what their core problems are. and in return, they have some ability to look at high-level finances, but no details. They don’t have project-level access, they don’t see the data, they don’t even see the project-specific issues we have with others [drug] developers.”
Working with partners is half of what Pepper Bio does. the other half is its own pipeline, focused on oncology. The seed round is intended to help the company make progress on both fronts to the point where it will be able to secure more funding, Hu said.
“On the domestic pipeline side, we’re looking for specific assets that we can reposition. We have already identified a number of them. we are in the process of negotiating either the final acquisition or […] an option to acquire, so we’ll need to have one of those [to raise a new round]. Most of our collaborations at present are much more limited in nature: they tend to be pilot projects. Before we can raise our next round, at least one of these will need to turn into a long-term partnership with broader financial issues.”
In addition to its partners in the pharmaceutical industry, whom it can also support in finding drugs for inflammatory and neurodegenerative diseases, Pepper Bio works with Felser Laboratory of Stanford to identify and validate therapeutic targets for lymphatic and liver cancers. But the common thread here isn’t the organs these cancers affect. is their transomics signature.
With poorly targeted drugs, patients “not only have to suffer the cancer, they have to suffer all the side effects of that drug without any of the benefits.” Better targeted drugs can have higher efficacy with lower toxicity, and this is where Pepper Bio hopes its approach can make a difference. “I think transomics is the last piece of the puzzle that genomics started about 20 years ago,” Hu said.
While there likely won’t be a silver bullet for curing cancer, let alone all untreatable diseases, it’s encouraging to see more startups trying new approaches—and more capital flowing their way.
