Discovering the “poisoned arrow” required a novel combination of biochemical expertise and machine learning, which turned out to be greater than the sum of their parts, and can lead to the discovery of many more powerful medicines, said Gitai, Princeton’s Edwin Grant Conklin Professor of Biology and a professor of molecular biology. To that end, Gitai founded ArrePath, a drug discovery spinout that recently announced a seed round of $20 million to advance its machine learning-based platform for discovering new classes of antibiotics and other drugs.
“Antimicrobial resistance is one of the greatest threats of our times,” said Gitai. “I am thrilled that ArrePath will help address this impending crisis by innovating the process of antibiotic drug discovery with novel technologies, insightful company leadership (President and CEO Lloyd Payne and Vice President for Technology and Data Science Kurt Thorn of the Class of 1996), and forward-looking investors.” To read the full story.