Perpetual Medicines  announced it has closed an $8 million seed financing to advance its integrated computational design and synthesis platform for peptide drug discovery. The financing round was led by Chengwei Capital.

The company also announced key appointments to its leadership team, including Kerry L. Blanchard, MD, PhD, Co-founder, Chairman and Chief Executive Officer; Ved Srivastava, PhD, Chief Technology Officer; and Xiang Ye, PhD, Chief Scientific Officer.

“Perpetual Medicines is capitalizing on recent advances in computational modeling based on artificial intelligence, deep learning and machine learning that enable access for the first time to the enormous, untapped peptide chemical space for drug discovery,” said Dr. Blanchard. “We have built an integrated platform that allows us to virtually iterate through millions of peptide sequences using physics-based computations to predict binding and drug-like properties followed by integration with experimental data to discover and optimize product candidates. This approach has the potential to accelerate peptide drug discovery, reduce cost, and increase the quality of drug candidates. With the financing the company will advance our most advanced program to the clinical stage and continue to build our preclinical portfolio of projects in oncology, autoimmunity, and metabolic diseases.”

Dr. Blanchard noted that peptide therapeutics have become the most rapidly growing sector of the pharmaceutical industry with predicted sales exceeding $140 billion¹/year by 2030. “Peptides fill the gap between small molecule drugs and therapeutic antibodies,” he said. “They are large enough and selective enough to block interactions between proteins inside and outside cells. These attributes, along with access to vastly expanded chemical space, will open new target classes and allow us to attack previously undruggable pathobiology.”