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The biotechnology startup creator Flagship Pioneering is rolling three of its fledgling companies into a new venture called Etcelera Therapeutics, which is combining artificial intelligence with an array of drug discovery tools to try to predict which experimental medicines might succeed in the clinic.
Flagship announced Thursday that the new startup has been formed from the parts of three former portfolio companies: Etiome, Cellarity and Empress Therapeutics. It’s led by Adrian “Ad” Rawcliffe, the former CEO of Adaptimmune and a veteran of GSK.
“Each had a piece of this puzzle, and if you bring them together, then we have the opportunity to go beyond what each of them was doing and redefine cause-and-effect in biology,” Rawcliffe said in an interview.
Etcelera claims that combining the technologies of these three companies with Flagship’s in-house AI capabilities should help its scientists pinpoint novel disease drivers and uncover small molecule medicines to target them. It also believes these drugs will have better odds than those discovered with traditional approaches. Rawcliffe said the datasets and technology developed by its three forebears could be useful in gauging which drugs might fail in human testing.
“If you feed appropriate machine learning enough biological language, then maybe it can infer what biology looks like, where meaning lies in biology and can predict what will happen in biological systems,” Rawcliffe said.
Biotech companies have long spoken enthusiastically about the ability of high-powered computing tools to upend drug discovery and cure many diseases. The hype has sparked blowback that companies using AI to design medicines may be overstating their potential and underestimating the complexities of human biology. Multiple biotechs built on AI technology have struggled in the public markets.
Yet private <a href="https://bitcomme.com/serious-pollution-by-water-industry-remains-high-despite-5bn-investment/” title=”Serious pollution by water industry remains high despite £5bn investment”>investment in AI drug discovery companies has accelerated in 2026. Several have raised large funding rounds, and one company, Iambic Therapeutics, recently went public. (AI giant Anthropic, which has invested heavily in life sciences research, could soon follow.)
Etcelera is combining AI tools with a series of other strategies. And one edge Rawcliffe believes the company has is its use of “perturbation data,” a way of seeing how a cell would respond to disruption, such as by silencing a gene or introducing a chemical.
