ArrePath, a new company that aims to use machine learning to find new drugs for infectious diseases, has received seed funding of $20 million from a group of investors including Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund.

The Princeton, New Jersey (USA)-based start-up plans to use the funding to further develop its AI and imaging-based drug discovery platform. The platform will be used to identify compounds with new and previously underutilised mechanisms of action. The approach combines phenotypic screening, proteomics and genomics-based technologies with machine learning-based data analysis, avoiding the use of standard growth inhibition tests that are slow and can miss potentially promising mechanisms. The company is thus deciphering the complex behaviour of bacteria when they are exposed to new chemical substances – and calls this a “bacterial autopsy”

ArrePath hopes its platform will yield entirely new classes of anti-infectives that could solve the growing problem of antimicrobial resistance (AMR). According to a study in The Lancet, AMR causes at least 1.27 million deaths each year. The platform is based on the work of Princeton University molecular biologist Dr Zemer Gitai and has already yielded a compound with a novel dual mechanism of action against Gram-negative and Gram-positive bacteria, published in the journal Cell in 2020.

The $20m seed funding round was led by Boehringer, Insight Partners and Innospark Ventures, with participation from Viva BioInnovator, Arimed Capital and others. News of the funding injection came at the same time as the appointment of Dr Lloyd Payne, former head of Evotec's anti-infectives division, as president and chief executive of ArrePath.

Payne had previously founded Euprotec, also an anti-infective discovery and development start-up, and served as CEO until its acquisition by Evotec in 2014. At Evotec, he was then responsible for a 200-strong scientific team researching tools to improve the discovery of new anti-infectives. “This funding is a strong vote of confidence from a global consortium of investors in our platform and its enormous potential in anti-infective research,” Payne said.