IMIDomics Inc., a drug discovery company focused on patients with immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs), has announced the completion of a $16.5 million Series A financing round. The round was led by DNS Capital with additional investment from Bristol Myers Squibb, The Pritzker Organization, Tao Capital and others. IMIDomics was founded in 2015, following a decade of incubation within Vall d’Hebron Hospital in Barcelona, during which the IMID-Biobank was built. The company relocated to the United States in 2021.
“We are proud to have closed a successful Series A and are honored to have a visionary and dedicated group of investors who share our passion for IMID patient care,” said Juan Harrison, President and CEO of IMIDomics. “Our partnerships with institutions like Vall d’Hebron Hospital as well as the thousands of patients living with immune-mediated inflammatory diseases, who have shared their data and samples over the past fifteen years, have given us a uniquely strong foundation for analyzing and discovering new ways to treat these complex diseases. With this new funding, we will be able to build on this foundation to fuel our precision discovery efforts and accelerate technologies that are critical to the further development of new IMID treatments, while expanding our teams in the US and Europe.”
IMIDomics’ Precision Discovery Platform combines and analyzes clinical, epidemiologic, and biomolecular data to uncover new insights about IMIDs including lupus, Crohn’s disease, rheumatoid arthritis, and ulcerative colitis. IMIDomics hosts the world’s leading dedicated IMID patient biobank, enabling a more granular understanding of these complex, interrelated and difficult-to-treat conditions. These insights allow the company to discover new and more effective treatment possibilities for IMIDs.
“We believe the IMIDomics platform is uniquely positioned to generate new and important insights that aid in the development of therapeutics to treat IMIDs,” said Michael Pucker, Chairman and CEO of DNS Capital. “We are excited to partner with IMIDomics’ extraordinary, dedicated team to support their future growth plans.”
The therapeutic needs of IMID patients have historically been underserved due to the complexity and lack of understanding around these diseases. Existing therapies are often unreliable, costly and can cause significant side effects. Furthermore, many IMID patients struggle to get an initial diagnosis and treatment because of the difficulty of identifying these related but distinct conditions.
“IMIDomics has established a Precision Discovery Platform that leverages patient data to reveal the fundamental mechanisms that drive immune-mediated inflammatory diseases. This deeper understanding offers the potential to lead discovery of new and more effective medicines,” said Dr. Sara Marsal, IMIDomics co-founder and Chief Medical Officer and Head of the Rheumatology Research Group and Department at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital. “Our approach can fundamentally change the way drugs are discovered for these complex diseases, and this financing will enable us to quickly identify relevant drug targets from the extensive data we have already collected.”
About IMIDomics
IMIDomics, Inc. is a privately held biotechnology company focused on the discovery and development of new medicines for the treatment of immune-mediated inflammatory diseases (IMIDs).
Headquartered in San Francisco, California, IMIDomics was founded in Barcelona in 2015 by Dr. Sara Marsal, Head of the Rheumatology Department at the Vall d’Hebron University Hospital, and Dr. Richard M. Myers, President and Scientific Director at the HudsonAlpha Institute for Biotechnology. Dr. Marsal began work on the IMID-Biobank at Vall d’Hebron University Hospital in 2006 where the project was incubated for ten years.
In the fifteen years since it began, the IMID-Biobank has grown to include real-world data from clinical records and biological samples from over 17,000 IMID patients and control subjects across six indications: rheumatoid arthritis, psoriasis, psoriatic arthritis, ulcerative colitis, Crohn’s disease and systemic lupus erythematosus. IMIDomics maintains an exclusive commercial license to use this leading resource on IMIDs for treatment discovery and development. IMIDomics utilizes a proprietary digital bioinformatics portal that integrates and interrogates data to generate novel insights into disease mechanisms, including identification of potential new drug targets.
This integrated capability, called the IMIDomics Precision Discovery Platform, enables precision medicine for IMID patients and will lead to therapies that address needs not addressed by current medicines. The company is actively conducting discovery programs, both for its internal pipeline and with pharmaceutical partners, while supporting the development and expansion of the biobank, patient datasets and bioinformatics portal.
