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The first thing Promise Bio CEO Ronnel Vexler wants you to know about the biotech company he co-founded is that it’s not just another AI drug discovery company. Instead, he is looking to bring precision medicine to autoimmune diseases.
Based in Tel Aviv CV Promise It has developed a cloud-based AI platform that can detect various post-translational modifications (PTMs) in proteins from a single blood sample. Before Promise technology, checking for the presence of one of these 200 protein modifications required separate individual tests. These PTMs are essential for the diagnosis and treatment of diseases such as autoimmune disorders.
“It’s so fundamental, it’s like going from a black-and-white TV to seeing color now,” Vexler told TechCrunch. “You’re seeing the same protein but in a completely different way.”
Having an easier way to test for these protein modifications could open up the potential for precision medicine for autoimmune diseases in the same way that advances in genomics have allowed precision therapy for cancer patients, Veksler said.
“When I practice medicine, when you meet people with autoimmune diseases, those patients are in a constant race to find the best drug for them,” Vexler said. “It’s a series of trial and error that doesn’t make sense when you have computational capabilities these days.”
Veksler described his journey to Promise Bio as a number of pieces falling into place. After earning his medical degree and working as a doctor for a few years, he earned a doctorate at the intersection of medicine and engineering before the pandemic. After working as a doctor and at a friend’s startup, C2i Genomics, he knew he wanted to do something that involved software, precision medicine, and autoimmune disorders.
His wife, Gal Neumann-Vexler, a partner at VC LionBird, came home one day in 2021 and told him that she had met Yifat Merbel, a senior scientist at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Israel, who was looking to advance computational biology. The technology she was working on.
Wexler called the scenario “a perfect fit.” Promise Bio was officially founded in January 2023 and has been operating underground ever since. The company already works with several large hospitals in the US and Israel and pharmaceutical companies including AstraZeneca and Pfizer.
Promise Bio is now coming out of stealth with a previously undisclosed $8.3 million seed round that closed in April 2023. The majority of the capital came from lead investor Awz Ventures as well as strategic investors AstraZeneca and Pfizer. The company is using the money to hire more people for its team and toward building a database of PTM data points that the company collects in its tests for use in future research and development.
Ronnie Al-Sheikh, general partner at Awz Ventures, told TechCrunch that he’s really bullish on the Promise Bio team, jokingly adding that it’s a very promising company. He added that the success that the company has been able to obtain so far from legacy institutions such as Pfizer and AstraZeneca is remarkable.
Al-Sheikh said: “If Pfizer is interested in this company, and AstraZeneca and the researchers in these institutes and hospitals are interested in this company, then we believe that this is a real verification.” “It’s just the beginning. I don’t know of any other company in this era that has this much traction with the (pharma) giants.”
Promise Bio has received a lot of interest from researchers and drug developers targeting other conditions such as neurological indications, but the team is focusing on autoimmune disorders for now — which affect an estimated 4% of the world’s population.
“It’s really crazy that we’re doing the same process that we were managing these diseases with 15 years ago,” Wexler said. “The number of treatment options is increasing. It is not sustainable. We cannot continue with this trial and error from pharmaceutical companies.”
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