For centuries, people have chewed willow bark to relieve pain, but scientists at the chemical company Bayer didn’t isolate its active ingredient until the 1800s and eventually patented it. its modified version as Aspirin.
Aspirin is just one example of a drug derived from natural sources. In fact, the World Health Organization estimates that about 40% of modern pharmaceuticals have roots in treatments used by our ancestors.
Even with this impressive success of harnessing nature’s bounty, scientists estimate that they have discovered only a small fraction of natural chemical compounds that could be developed into powerful medicines.
In part this is because identifying, isolating and testing molecules from nature is complex and more time-consuming than synthesizing new compounds in a laboratory.
Viswa Colluru, an early employee of Recursion Pharmaceuticals, which went public in 2021, decided that artificial intelligence and other techniques can speed up the process of discovering new drugs from nature.
In 2019, Colluru left Recursion to start Enveda Biosciencesa Boulder, Colorado-based biotech that analyzes plant chemistry to discover potential drugs.
Colluru told TechCrunch that Enveda tapped into all the digital information in the world about how people in different cultures have used plants to treat pain and disease.
“We found that geographically separated cultures from around the world were much more likely to use similar plants for similar diseases and symptoms, even though they never spoke to each other,” he said. “They discovered that a certain plant helps a stomachache or a certain plant helps like a fever or a headache, and that’s literally thousands of years of experiential human wisdom.”
Today, the company’s database has 38,000 medicinal plants linked to about 12,000 diseases and symptoms.
Once Enveda’s AI identifies plants with the highest likelihood of providing treatments, team members assemble the materials and test them using the company’s lab and AI model. Unlike traditional methods for studying single molecules, Enveda’s transformer model can decipher the “chemical language” of the entire sample.
“Once we know their shape, we can prioritize the right sets of molecules and say, one day it will be a drug,” Colluru said.
Enveda’s approach is starting to pay off. Two of the company’s drugs — one to treat skin conditions including eczema and the other for inflammatory bowel disease — are expected to begin clinical trials later this year, according to Colluru.
The company’s scientific progress has attracted the attention of investors. On Thursday, Enveda announced that it has raised $55 million Series B2 from new investors including Microsoft, The Nature Conservancy, Premji Invest and Lingotto Investment Fund and existing backers Kinnevik, True Ventures, FPV, Level Ventures and Jazz Venture Partners. The new funding brings the company’s total capital to $230 million.
The new round allows Enveda to add long-term strategic partners to its capital slate, and the company plans to raise its Series C later this year after clinical trials begin, Colluru said.
Microsoft is also providing some cloud credits as part of the deal, but that’s separate from its cash investment, according to Colluru.
While sampling plants to find drugs is an age-old approach, Enveda is one of the few companies doing this with the help of artificial intelligence. UK-based Pangea Bio is also studying plants to discover drugs to treat neurological conditions.
Of course, much of the attention in this area has gone to marijuana and the natural sources best known for producing psilocybin in so-called “magic mushrooms” or other psychedelics that have the potential to treat mental health disorders, but Enveda doesn’t care in the study of their compounds.
“Everyone is focused on cannabis and psychedelics, which is just a small fraction of the natural world,” Colluru said. “The natural world is so rich in its chemical diversity and biological effects that studying just 100 plants is enough to yield so many potential drugs that we don’t know what to do with them.”
