We know that drug discovery is a topic which is widely talked about in the society because of its impact on how the lives of humans can be made better and prolonged. We know that there are still a lot of diseases that do not have any cure and drug discoverers are trying their level-best in order to find the suitable drugs that can prevent or remedy those symptoms. Now, a new drug discovery startup named Pepper Bio wants to challenge the Eroom’s law in this department and have raised a new round of funding to proceed with its idea.
“Today, drug development still takes on average 10-15 years of R&D with a cost of production (around $2.5 billion) that has increased dramatically over the last decade despite improvements in technology: this is the concept of Eroom’s law (Moore’s law spelled backward),” Pepper Bio CEO adds that “While AI could help uncover new drugs, “the AI analysis is really only as good as the data that you put into it,” and added that transomics are part of that data. He said “Transomics may be an emerging term, but the COVID-19 pandemic made us more familiar with some of the layers it encompasses. “There are currently four different -omics types that we’re working with: DNA, RNA, proteomic data, and phosphoproteomic data,”
You may have identified the first two as genomics and transcriptomics; as for the last one, phosphoproteomics, she summed it up as “proteins with molecular switches that are added that turn them on and off.” More than each layer in itself, though, what matters to Pepper Bio is to get the full picture. This is also why it prefers to talk about transomics than about multi-omics, which it sees as too disconnected; and why it compares itself to Google Maps. Just like real-time navigation data is richer and therefore much more useful than static maps, Pepper Bio is “bringing the same types of advances to drug discovery — a routing context of activity,”
Pepper Bio shared a study that says that there is “an overall failure rate in drug development of over 96%, including a 90% failure rate during clinical development.” If transomics can improve the odds of success before the costly clinical trial phase starts, pharmaceutical giants will likely be interested — and Pepper Bio is already on their radar.
