Flagship Pioneering has announced the formation of Etcelera, a company created by the merger of the platforms of Cellarity, Etiome and Empress Therapeutics. 

The new company aims to pioneer causal intelligence in human biology: the ability to determine what truly drives disease and predict how a medicine will act in patients before it reaches the clinic. 

By combining high-resolution human transcriptomic data, advanced chemoproteomics, and advanced perturbation data generation, Etcelera’s unified platform can elucidate cause and effect in disease at the molecular level.  

This, combined with Flagship’s in-house AI capabilities, enables Etcelera to define novel targets and discover and develop small molecules against them with a greater probability of clinical success. 

“Each of these foundational platforms has been a pioneer in its own right, advancing our understanding of human biology to inform drug discovery,” said Noubar Afeyan, Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering and Co-Founder of Etcelera. “The combined company, together with Flagship’s in-house AI capabilities through our Pioneering Intelligence unit, has the cutting-edge AI tools, data, and expertise to tackle one of the biggest challenges in drug development.” 

The company launches with programmes in haematology (including myelofibrosis and essential thrombocythemia), metabolism (including partnered programs in MASH), and immunology. 

Etcelera’s integrated platform builds on more than 20 years of combined data, including the largest foundation model in the industry trained on data from 150 million cells, and more than 30 proprietary, AI-powered prediction models. 

“Approximately 50% of drug candidates that reach Phase II fail because the industry lacks causal intelligence,” said Alec Reynolds, Chairman of Etcelera and Senior Partner, Flagship Pioneering. “Our vision is to build a compounding AI system that becomes a definitive source of novel medicines that are more likely to succeed in clinical development than any prior technology.”