Capital Will Be Used To Advance Internal Development Programs for Clinical Testing
Company Appoints 3 New Board Members
Palo Alto, CA – June 26, 2013 – NuMedii, Inc. today announced that it has recieved $3.5M in a Series A funding led by Claremont Creek Ventures and Lightspeed Venture Partners, with participation by Life Science Angels and others. NuMedii raised this initial funding to further develop its proprietary technology and prepare its first three internal drug development programs for clinical testing.
“NuMedii’s drug development approach is extremely capital efficient and is designed to be much more successful in bringing new therapeutics to patients. We are excited to have the backing of investors and advisors who have a track record of successfully establishing life science companies and who support our long term vision for our company,” said NuMedii founder and CEO, Gini Deshpande, PhD.
By leveraging vast amounts of life sciences “Big Data” correlating disease information with drug data, NuMedii’s technology predicts which drugs will be most effective in treating a particular disease. NuMedii then translates this information into novel therapeutic candidates. NuMedii’s core technology was invented by its co-founder, Dr. Atul Butte at Stanford University and is exclusively licensed to NuMedii.
NuMedii is also expanding its Board of Directors. In addition to Drs. Deshpande and Butte, the Board will include Ted Driscoll, PhD, Brad Webb, PhD and Samuel Saks, MD. Ted is a Venture Partner leading the Digital Healthcare team at Claremont Creek Ventures and will serve as Chairman. Brad is a Venture Partner at Claremont Creek Ventures and Sam is a board-certified oncologist and founder of Jazz Pharmaceuticals, Inc.
Sam Saks commented, “I have been an advisor to NuMedii since 2011 and believe NuMedii’s technology is an example of the type of innovation that is required to fundamentally address the constant failure plaguing the drug development industry.”
“NuMedii is pioneering “digital” pharma development, which perfectly fits Claremont Creek Ventures’ focus on investing in early stage companies that are revolutionizing medicine with genetics, data mining and computation,” added Ted Driscoll.
Ravi Mhatre, Partner at Lightspeed Venture Partners, noted that LSVP “is actively investing in disruptive applications of Big Data. NuMedii has the potential to disrupt the drug development process by utilizing life science Big Data.”
NuMedii today also announced the appointment of Craig Webb, Ph.D as its Chief Scientific Officer. Dr. Webb spent the past thirteen years developing an integrated program in translational medicine as one of the founding scientists at the Van Andel Research Institute in Michigan. His work focused on integrating advances in genomics and computational biology to identify optimal therapies for cancer patients, and identify new uses of existing drugs beyond their approved indication.
“I am delighted to be joining a talented team of dedicated individuals with a collective focus on the efficient discovery and rapid validation of new uses of existing drugs. The NuMedii approach represents the most time and cost effective means through which safe and effective medicines can be developed for patients in need,” said Dr. Webb.
About NuMedii, Inc.
Founded in 2008, NuMedii discovers and de-risks effective new drugs by translating its predictive Big Data technology into therapies with a higher probability of therapeutic success. The company’s Big Data technology, originally developed at Stanford and licensed exclusively to NuMedii, consists of billions of data points of ever-increasing amounts of comprehensive disease, pharmacological and clinical data. NuMedii integrates these data with network-based algorithms to discover drug-disease connections and biomarkers that are predictive of efficacy. The company has successfully validated its Big Data technology as six of six drug candidates have demonstrated preclinical activity for the predicted new indication. NuMedii will partner with pharmaceutical companies for the development and commercialization of its proprietary therapeutic candidates. NuMedii entered into a strategic collaboration with Aptalis Pharma in 2012 to develop new therapies for gastrointestinal disorders and cystic fibrosis. The company’s advisors include longtime Bay Area biotech entrepreneur Corey Goodman, former Pacific Biosciences Inc. Chief Scientific Officer Eric Schadt and Pankaj Jay Pasricha, Director of the Center for Neurogastroenterology at Johns Hopkins University. For more information, visit www.numedii.com.
About Claremont Creek Ventures
Claremont Creek Ventures (CCV) is a seed and early stage venture firm. The firm focuses on information technology (IT) driven opportunities where it has deep domain expertise such as digital healthcare, energy technology, payments/commerce, and online businesses. CCV builds successful companies today by staying lean, using capital efficiently, and developing great teams. Utilizing the firm’s proprietary life-cycle venturing program, CCV partners with entrepreneurs and institutions, including UC Berkeley, Lawrence Livermore Labs, Stanford University and UC Davis. Claremont Creek Ventures has more than $300 million in capital under management in two funds. For more information, visit www.claremontcreek.com.
About Lightspeed Venture Partners
Lightspeed Venture Partners is a leading global venture capital firm with over $2 billion of committed capital under management. Lightspeed’s investment professionals and advisors are located in Silicon Valley, India, Israel and China with Lightspeed China Partners. Over the past two decades, the Lightspeed team has backed more than 200 companies, many of which have become leaders in their respective markets, including Blue Nile, Brocade, Ciena, DoubleClick, eHealth, Fusion-io, Informatica, Kiva Software, Kosmix, LivingSocial, Lucky Pai, Maker Communications, Playdom, Provigent, Riverbed Technology, Solazyme, TutorVista, Virsa Systems, Waveset, and XtremIO. For more information, visit the Lightspeed website: www.lightspeedvp.com
NuMedii Contact:
Gini Deshpande, PhD
Founder and CEO
NuMedii, Inc
(650) 521-6363