Biology is never easy. As researchers progress in reading and editing genes to treat the disease, for example, the growing body of evidence suggests that proteins and metabolites around those genes cannot be ignored.
MIT spinout revived has created a platform to measure metabolites – products of metabolism such as lipids, cholesterol, sugar and carbs – on scale. The company is using measures to detect why some patients respond to treatment when other people understand the drivers of the disease better.
“Historically, we are capable of measuring a few hundred metabolites with high accuracy, but it is a part of the metabolites present in our body,” Revived CEO Leela Pirhaji PhD “is called ’16 Installed. “We have a big difference between the measuring measuring accurately and what is present in our body, and that is what we want to deal with. We want to tap in powerful insights from the undertaking metabolite data. ,
The progress of revivemed comes when the comprehensive medical community is rapidly associated with diseases like cancer, Alzheimer’s and heart disease. Revivemed is using its platform to help some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies who find patients who benefit from their treatment. It is also giving software to academic researchers for free to help gain insight from unused metabolite data.
“With the field of AI boom, we think we can overcome data problems that have limited the study of metabolites,” called Pirhaji. “There is no foundation model for metabolomics, but we see how these models are changing various areas like genomics, so we are starting to advance their development.”
Finding a challenge
Pirrahji was born and raised in Iran, which was in 2010 before coming to MIT to do PhD in Biological Engineering. She had previously read Frankel’s research papers and was excited to contribute to the network models that she was making, which integrated data from sources such as genomes, protos and other molecules.
Frankel says, “We were thinking about the big picture what you can do when you can measure everything – genes, RNA, protein, and small molecules like metabolites and lipids,” Frankels, which currently say, which is currently Revives works in the board of directors. , “We are probably capable of measuring something like 0.1 percent of small molecules only in the body. We thought that there should be a way to achieve the broad view of those molecules as we have for other people. This will allow us to map all the changes in the cell, whether it is in the context of cancer or development or degenerative diseases. ,
On the way about half the way through his PhD, Pirrahji sent some samples to a colleague to Harvard University to collect data on metabolomes – small molecules that are products of metabolic processes. The colleague sent Pirhaji back a huge Excel sheet with thousands of data lines – but he told him that it is better to ignore everything beyond the top 100 rows because he did not know what other data meant. He took it as a challenge.
“I started thinking that maybe we can use our network model to solve this problem,” recall Pirhaji. “There was a lot of ambiguity in the data, and it was very interesting for me because no one tried earlier. It looked like a big difference in the field. ,
Pirrahji developed a huge knowledge graph which included millions of interactions between protein and metabolites. The data was rich, but was messy – Pirrahji called it a “hair ball”, who could not tell the researchers anything about the disease. To make it more useful, he created a new way to mark metabolic routes and features. In a 2016 paper Nature methodsHe described the system and used it to analyze metabolic changes in a model of Huntington disease.
Initially, Pirrahji had no intention of starting a company, but began to feel technology’s professional ability in the last years of his PhD.
“Iran has no entrepreneurial culture,” says Pirahji. “I did not know how to start the company or to convert science into startups, so I took advantage of everything in MIT.”
Pirrahji started taking classes at the MIT Slone School of Management, including the course 15.371 (Innovation Team), where he along with classmates asked to think about how to implement their technology. He also used Mit Venture Mentoring Service and MIT Sandbox, and attended the Martin Trust Center for delta V startup accelerator of MIT Entrepreneurship.
When Pirhaji and Frankel officially established reconsideration, they worked with the MIT technology licensing office to reach the patent around their work. Pirhaji has since developed the forum, which has been discovered by negotiating with hundreds of leaders in pharmaceutical companies to solve other problems.
It was resumed to work with hospitals how the lipids are known as steethaepatitis associated with metabolic dysfunction. In 2020, Rivaived worked with Bristol Myers Squib, to guess how the cancer patients would respond to the immunotherapy of the company.
Since then, Revaved has worked with several companies, including four of the top 10 global pharmaceutical companies to help them understand the metabolic system behind their treatment. Those insights help to identify patients who stand to benefit more rapidly than various treatments.
“If we know which patients will benefit from every medicine, it will actually reduce the complexity and time associated with clinical trials,” says Pirhaji. “Patients will get the right treatment.”
General model for metabolism
Earlier this year, Revaved collected a dataset based on 20,000 patient blood samples, which was used to create a digital twin and generative AI model of patients for metabolomics research. Revivemed is providing its general model to non -profit academic researchers, who can speed up our understanding of how metabolites affect a series of diseases.
“We are democratizing the use of metabolomic data,” says Pirhaji. “It is impossible for us to have data from every patient in the world, but our digital twins can be used to find patients who can benefit from treatment based on their demographics, for example, those patients Those who can be at risk of heart disease by searching. , ,
This task is part of the mission of Revaved to create a metabolic Foundation model that can use researchers and pharmaceutical companies to understand how diseases and treatment patients change the metabolites of patients.
“Leela solved a lot of difficult problems, when you are trying to take an idea from the laboratory and turn it into something that is strong and reproducible to be deployed in biomedicine,” Frankel says. Are. “The way, he also felt the software that he has developed is incredibly powerful and can be transformative.”
