The Top Line · Fierce Life Sciences

What Xaira is building after its $1B fundraise

·33 min·2 clips

Jeff Yonker quotes Eric Schmidt: "math is to physics as machine learning is to biology," and calls single experiments a "postage stamp on a football field."

1. The Top Line, from Fierce Pharma and Fierce Biotech, asks what Xaira Therapeutics is building after its $1 billion private financing, and Xaira has said little publicly since. 2. Host Ayla Ellison introduces Jeff Yonker, Xaira's president and COO since July, and Fierce Biotech's Gabrielle Mason conducts the interview. 3. Yonker's thesis is that Xaira is "an AI company" built to discover and develop medicines, so it is funded to build an integrated machine-learning R&D platform and then test its medicines in people. 4. Yonker traces his path from counterterrorism studies and law school to Silicon Valley startups, then business development at Genentech, and says Xaira is his seventh venture-backed startup since Genentech's 2009 acquisition by Roche. 5. He cites a drop in R&D productivity, with R&D dollars "halved every nine years since 1950," and says Xaira aims to answer three questions: which biology to modulate, which molecule to use, and which patients will benefit. 6. He says a June publication perturbed genes across a roughly 20,000-by-20,000 grid, quadrupled the world's data of that type, and fed virtual cell models that he says look at about 10 billion data points at once. 7. He says the model, trained without the T cell literature, listed most known T cell activators and named a few that are not known, which the team is still testing. 8. On the pipeline, Yonker says Xaira is working on "more than a couple of handfuls of projects" and starting with antibodies against hard-to-drug targets with validated biology, building on David Baker's protein design work. 9. He says the design model could extend to cyclic peptides, macrocycles, and small molecules, which may prompt an additional raise, and that Xaira expects its first announced collaborations to be with tech companies. 10. Fits biotech and pharma professionals tracking AI-driven drug discovery.

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