Swiss biotech company Atlas Bio has launched after operating in stealth mode and raised $10 million in a seed round led by Creandum. The company had also secured an earlier pre-seed round led by First Momentum Ventures and LEA Partners, bringing its total funding to $12.5 million.
Atlas Bio is developing an AI model that can run virtual clinical trials. The technology aims to predict how drugs may work and identify potential safety risks before they reach Phase II clinical trials.
The company’s AI model is trained on around 2 million RNA readouts from human tissue. These readouts show how genes become active or inactive inside the body and help the model learn how biological systems respond to different treatments.
Using this data, Atlas Bio aims to simulate how a drug might affect individual patients in a virtual group. The company hopes this approach will help researchers improve drug development, reduce the need for costly clinical trials and limit the use of animal testing.
According to Simon Romanski, CEO and co-founder of Atlas Bio, for sixty years, drug development has been built on two flawed assumptions: that mice predict humans, and that the only way to learn whether a drug works is to give it to thousands of patients and wait. “Both are now becoming outdated. Human biology is finally legible to AI – and that changes the economics of this entire industry. Many failed Phase II trials is a treatment that didn’t reach a patient who needed it, and the cost of that failure has become impossible to defend when the technology to fix it exists. Atlas Bio is the end of Phase II as we know it, and the end of animal testing as the price of progress.”
Katharina Wilhelm, Partner at Creandum, commented: “The first wave of AI in drug development focused on drug design and is well underway. Now, we are entering the second wave: clinical development. Today, clinical trials take years, cost hundreds of millions, and still fail 70 per cent of the time. What excites us about Atlas is their ability to simulate trials without requiring sensitive treatment data. They are paving the way for a future where predictive models can replace steps of the clinical trial process entirely, allowing their customers to drive down both time and costs substantially.”
Atlas Bio will use the funding to grow its scientific and business teams, further test and improve its platform, and bring more business customers on board through 2026.
