SOUTH SAN FRANCISCO, Calif. — Vevo Therapeutics, a biotechnology company using its Mosaic technology and next generation AI to uncover better drugs for more patients, announced today that it has generated the world’s largest single-cell atlas of how drugs interact with and affect tumor cells. The company’s Mosaic platform is the first to make pan-cancer testing of drugs at single cell resolution scalable.
Vevo’s approach combines data from the atlas with AI models to uncover novel targets and pathways and pair them with the best drug molecules in order to treat major cancer subtypes. Data collected will provide an unprecedented depth of information on how drug molecules perturb biology of patient cells.
“We are thrilled to reach this important milestone of creating a 100 million cell atlas of how chemistry perturbs biology, and we believe this will open new opportunities for drug discovery and development. This atlas is far beyond the scale of any existing datasets, and we plan to generate many more datasets through the Mosaic platform,” said Johnny Yu, Chief Scientific Officer and Co-founder of Vevo Therapeutics.
The Mosaic platform is the key technology that enabled the atlas. In a single in vitro or in vivo experiment, Mosaic can measure how a drug impacts cells from tens to hundreds of patients, generating millions of datapoints on drug-induced changes in gene expression.
“Traditionally, drugs are discovered by searching for molecules that bind to single, isolated protein targets in test tubes. With this data, we now have the ability to search for drug molecules that actually treat cells from heterogeneous patients and can uncover how the drug molecule does that at single-gene, single-cell precision,” said Yu. “This accelerates the path towards building clinical products at a fraction of the cost and allows us to pick the best drug molecules, identify the best drug combinations to increase efficacy, and find the patients that are most likely to respond to them – all in one experiment.”
Generated and delivered in five weeks using the Mosaic technology, the Tahoe-100M data set comprises 100 million cells and 60,000 experiments, mapping 1,200 drug treatments across 50 different tumor models. The platform leverages single-cell RNA sequencing capabilities from Parse Biosciences’ GigaLab that leverages Evercode combinatorial barcoding technology for scalable single cell analysis. High-throughput sequencing was provided by Ultima Genomics’ UG100 instrument. The Tahoe-100M atlas will enable deep profiling of drugs across multiple tumor types allowing for identification of mechanisms of action and novel target discovery.
“The Tahoe-100M atlas sets a new standard, eclipsing currently available single-cell datasets. Most public datasets contain observational data from healthy cells, but Tahoe-100M consists entirely of drug-perturbed datapoints from diseased cells. It is 50X larger than all public drug-perturbed single cell data generated to date, which makes it much more suitable for drug discovery purposes,” said Nima Alidoust, Chief Executive Officer and Co-founder of Vevo Therapeutics.
“Efforts to train an AI model of human cells have been hampered by the paucity of large-scale datasets that measure cells across diverse states. The Tahoe-100M atlas entirely changes the game, allowing us to train much larger AI models that can better learn the language of the cell,” added Hani Goodarzi, Vevo Co-founder, Associate Professor at University of CA, San Francisco and Core Investigator at Arc Institute.
Vevo will announce additional collaborations around this dataset in Q1 2025.
About Vevo Therapeutics
Vevo Therapeutics is a biotechnology company using its in vivo drug discovery platform and next generation AI models to uncover better drugs for more patients. The company’s Mosaic platform is the first to make multi-patient drug screening data scalable, with single-cell precision, to better represent patient diversity in drug response. Vevo is using Mosaic to build the world’s largest atlas of how drugs interact with patient cells and training AI models on its data to find novel targets and drugs undetectable by other technologies.
Located in South San Francisco, CA, Vevo was founded by a team of inventors and thought leaders who have discovered drugs for “undruggable” targets and invented novel methods in genomics, computational biology, and chemistry. Vevo is backed by leading investors at the intersection of life sciences and technology, including General Catalyst, Wing Venture Capital, Mubadala Capital, AIX Ventures, and Camford Capital.
Vevo Media Contact:
Peg Rusconi
Deerfield Group