The partnership aims to address a significant unmet medical need, particularly in the MENA region
Press Release
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Doha – Denovo Sciences Inc., a pioneer in AI-driven drug discovery based on synthetic data, Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar (WCM-Q), a leading biomedical research and educational institution, and Sidra Medicine, a women’s and children’s healthcare organization, are engaging in a collaboration to identify and develop novel drug candidates for homocystinuria, a rare and genetic metabolic disorder. The partnership aims to address a significant unmet medical need, particularly in the MENA region, where the condition has one of the highest prevalence rates in the world. Homocystinuria is an inherited disorder that impairs the body's ability to process the amino acid methionine, leading to a toxic buildup of homocysteine in the blood. This can cause severe complications, including developmental delays, vision problems, skeletal abnormalities, and a high risk of life-threatening blood clots and strokes. While current treatments involving strict dietary restrictions and supplements exist, they have limited efficacy for a significant portion of patients. The need for new therapeutic options is especially critical in the MENA region, where prevalence rates, such as in Qatar (1 in 1,800 births), are drastically higher than the global average (more than 1 in 200,000 births). “We are thrilled to partner with prestigious institutions like Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar and Sidra Medicine,” said Hovakim Zakaryan, the CEO of Denovo Sciences. “Our Denovo Platform is uniquely suited to tackle rare diseases where data is scarce or absent. By combining our cutting-edge computational design with WCM-Q’s outstanding biological and pre-clinical expertise, we are confident we can discover a much-needed therapy for homocystinuria patients, particularly in the region where it is most needed.”
The collaboration will leverage the unique strengths of all three organizations. Denovo Sciences Inc. will conduct quantum mechanics/molecular mechanics studies and will deploy its proprietary AI-based Denovo Platform to generate promising drug candidates with high efficacy. Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar will contribute its state-of-the-art research facilities, deep expertise in metabolic diseases, and a world-class team of researchers to study the drug candidates delivered by Denovo Sciences Inc. Sidra Medicine will employ its extensive clinical expertise in homocystinuria to decide on the next steps regarding implementation of the novel candidates in the clinic. “This three-way collaboration builds on the combined expertise of Denovo Sciences, WCM-Q, and Sidra Medicine to tackle a devastating disease that affects the multiple families in Qatar,” said Prof. Khaled Machaca, Professor of Systems and Computational Biomedicine/Vice Dean for Research, Innovations, and Commercialization at WCM-Q. “We sincerely hope that the combined efforts and cutting-edge technologies will result in some relief to the affected individuals.”
“Our expertise and specialist treatment protocols for children with rare diseases, makes us a strong partner in this ground-breaking initiative with Denovo Sciences and WCM-Q,” said Prof. Tawfeg Ben Omran, Division Chief of Genomic and Genetic Medicine at Sidra Medicine. “The implementation of a new AI-driven therapy program for homocystinuria, will change the course of care for young patients in Qatar and across the region.”
About Denovo Sciences Inc.
Denovo Sciences Inc. is a techbio company developing drug candidates through its proprietary Denovo Platform, which applies synthetic data to train AI models for drug discovery. By overcoming the limitations of scarce and incomplete experimental data, the Denovo Platform enables more effective exploration of chemical space and supports the rapid design of novel small molecules with strong drug-like properties. About Weill Cornell Medicine Qatar
Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar is a partnership between Cornell University and Qatar Foundation. It offers a comprehensive Six-Year Medical Program leading to the Cornell University M.D. degree with teaching by Cornell and Weill Cornell faculty and by physicians at Hamad Medical Corporation (HMC), Sidra Medicine, the Primary Health Care Corporation, and Aspetar Orthopedic and Sports Medicine Hospital, who hold Weill Cornell appointments. Through its biomedical research program, WCM-Q is building a sustainable research community in Qatar while advancing basic science and clinical research. Through its medical college, WCM-Q seeks to provide the finest education possible for medical students, to improve health care both now and for future generations, and to provide high quality health care to the Qatari population
About Sidra Medicine
From the heart of Qatar, Sidra Medicine, is a private, not-for-profit academic healthcare and research institution for women, children, and young people. Established by the Qatar Foundation for Education, Science, and Community Development, Sidra Medicine is committed to delivering exceptional patient and family-focused care, conducting innovative biomedical and clinical research, and providing a personalized journey of care and cure and precision medicine specifically for rare and genetic diseases. Send us your press releases to  pressrelease.zawya@lseg.com
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Denovo Sciences, Sidra Medicine, and Weill Cornell Medicine-Qatar announce collaboration to discover drug candidates for Homocystinuria

Sparxell produces 100% natural, biodegradable non-toxic performance pigments from cellulose. The startup has ongoing projects with companies like Chanel, LVMH, L'Oreal Paris. It has received investments from prominent venture capital firs including Future Communities Capital and L’Oreal's Circular Innovation Fund. ‍
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BlueQubit builds first-in-class quantum software for current and upcoming quantum computers. Their recent paper on Quantum ML has been featured in the Nvidia newsletter, a testament to the team's innovative work. Achievements
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Denovo Sciences is an early-stage drug discovery company. Their data-independent AI platform is based on pure reinforcement learning which excels in tackling targets with scarce data where most of the current AI approaches perform poorly. Their vision centers on creating a target- agnostic AI platform capable of identifying new small molecule drug candidates with desired properties across a wide range of targets. They already showcased superior results both in silico and in vitro. Across multiple drug discovery programs, they maintain a remarkable 30% hit rate in each of them. Achievements
Denovo Sciences is an early-stage drug discovery company. Their data-independent AI platform is based on pure reinforcement learning which excels in tackling targets with scarce data where most of the current AI approaches perform poorly. Their vision centers on creating a target- agnostic AI platform capable of identifying new small molecule drug candidates with desired properties across a wide range of targets. They already showcased superior results both in silico and in vitro. Across multiple drug discovery programs, they maintain a remarkable 30% hit rate in each of them. Description‍
SleepDoctor is the first digital sleep clinic aiming to provide holistic lifetime sleep care. 1 billion people suffer fromSleep Apnea, 80% of them are undiagnosed. So SD started by providing 10x faster and easier Sleep Apnea diagnostic. Launched in Paris in September 2021, part of HECIncubator (Station F), revenue is growing 50% every quarter, reached positive unit economics and 75 NPS score. The startup has a $32K ARR and signed a lead investor for EUR1.2m. SD gathered a scientific committee of 3 key opinion leader doctors/scientiests and are about to release a scientific study based on the 60,000questionnaire responses of their patients. Achievements
SleepDoctor is the first digital sleep clinic aiming to provide holistic lifetime sleep care. 1 billion people suffer fromSleep Apnea, 80% of them are undiagnosed. So SD started by providing 10x faster and easier Sleep Apnea diagnostic. Launched in Paris in September 2021, part of HECIncubator (Station F), revenue is growing 50% every quarter, reached positive unit economics and 75 NPS score. The startup has a $32K ARR and signed a lead investor for EUR1.2m. SD gathered a scientific committee of 3 key opinion leader doctors/scientiests and are about to release a scientific study based on the 60,000questionnaire responses of their patients. Description‍
Sailfish AI is a human emulation platform that enables companies to do product validation, instant A/B testing, and continuous quality testing before their products ship to users enabling engineering & product teams to ship high-quality and bug-free products faster. Achievements
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Thera B Medical is a medical technology company dedicated to developing innovative solutions for infant care. Snuglit by TheraB is an all-in-one jaundice treatment for newborns that is being developed in partnership with Stanford Medical
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The startup has Takeda as their contracted customer, andVertex and Oak Ridge National Laboratory as their pilot stage customers. They have recently become a J&J LABS company. Johnson & Johnson is the largest pharmaceutical company in the world - and now they are a newly minted member of their scientific community. A third of JLABS companies secure a contract with J&J, and80% of JLABS companies to date have either exited, gone public, or are still thriving. Thanks to J&J, they currently have a pipeline of over 20 companies that boasts >$5MARR. Description‍
Digital PPC Campaign creation software
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BlueQubit is in active negotiations with WellsFargo to implement their solutions at the bank, as well as United States Air Force and theDepartment of Energy (DOE). They recently announced a partnership with Q-CTRL for a joint project, and are working on developing a plugin for PennyLane, integrating their technology with this widely-used quantum machine learning library. Description SleepDoctor is the first digital sleep clinic aiming to provide holistic lifetime sleep care. 1 billion people suffer fromSleep Apnea, 80% of them are undiagnosed. So SD started by providing 10x faster and easier Sleep Apnea diagnostic. Achievements Launched in Paris in September 2021, part of HECIncubator (Station F), revenue is growing 50% every quarter, reached positive unit economics and 75 NPS score. The startup has a $32K ARR and signed a lead investor for EUR1.2m. SD gathered a scientific committee of 3 key opinion leader doctors/scientiests and are about to release a scientific study based on the 60,000 questionnaire responses of their patients. Description‍
Denovo Sciences is an early-stage drug discovery company.Their data-independent AI platform is based on pure reinforcement learning which excels in tackling targets with scarce data where most of the current AI approaches perform poorly. Their vision centers on creating a target-agnostic AI platform capable of identifying new small-molecule drug candidates with desired properties across a wide range of targets. Achievements
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Docus is an AI Health Assistant that helpsmake accurate health decisions. Get ahealth report and validate it with a topdoctor's medical second opinion. Achievements
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CloudChipr is a cloud cost management and analytics platform for cloud accounts, it allows to find optimizations and allows automations in 1 click saving 30-65% of cloud costs. Achievements
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Triple S Ventures Management LLC

By LARA SETRAKIAN
8 minute Read
A star entrepreneur in Armenia, Marina Aghayan is an embodiment of her country’s ambitions in biotechnology—and a reflection of its grit. From her hometown of Yerevan she went as a graduate student to Spain, subsisting on a food budget of 3 euros a month. advertisement
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“I found a place to buy bread with 25 slices for 33 cents,” Aghayan tells me. “I found out that when you cook rice—80 cents for 1 kilogram—you triple the size and the mass of the rice. So it’s really very nice to use when you’re suffering.”
Quickly learning to overcome hunger and adversity, she began publishing prolifically in the field of materials science and went on to earn a PhD in Estonia. Last year her journey came full circle: She returned to Armenia and founded AIP Scientific , a bioengineering firm that produces customized orthopedic implants. The company uses 3D printing and biodegradable materials that promote new bone growth. Aghayan is also cofounder and CEO of Fact Industries , a bio- and material engineering company in Estonia that develops 3D-printing prototypes for the European Space Agency. I met Aghayan a few months after I moved to Armenia with my family. It was an early-pandemic lifestyle move: My husband and I, born in the U.S. and Canada, respectively, both grew up in ethnic Armenian households. We thought it would be a great experience for us and our kids to weather the lockdowns in Yerevan while absorbing the culture and language plus roaming the mountains and monasteries in the countryside. What we didn’t anticipate was meeting entrepreneurs like Marina Aghayan, who stunned us with their passion, perseverance, and potential, and quickly turned us into angel investors in this country. advertisement
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Aghayan is part of the vanguard of biotech entrepreneurs aiming to build a production hub for niche products, innovative software, and mathematical models in Armenia. In the quietly emerging ecosystem of companies and educational initiatives, many of the standout founders are women like her, representing a blend of technical skill and exceptional determination. According to the Armenian Bioinformatics Institute, 60% to 70% of professionals in biotech are women (compared to an estimated 47% in biotech companies worldwide ). And they are positioning Armenia’s biotech sector for growth. Those women founders are among the reasons I am convinced that Armenia is a prime destination for global tech investors and impact accelerators. Their stories and the sector opportunities they’re creating are too compelling to miss—a classic case of underinvestment in women and in emerging market technology clusters. Despite the strong foundation and meaningful openings for the Armenian biotech industry, biotech startups here attracted roughly $50 million in venture capital investment in 2021, a fraction of the $3.6 billion invested in the sector globally. Given the talent and opportunity in this country, more investors and impact funds should include Armenian ventures in their pipelines. They’d be in good company: Earlier this year Nvidia, a global high-tech giant with a significant AI and machine learning portfolio, opened a research center in Yerevan. “There are a lot of great brains over here that can contribute to what we’re building,” Lev Lebaredian, a VP at Nvidia, said in a local media interview. advertisement
Armen Kherlopian, cofounder of BAJ Accelerator, which supports Armenian biotech firms, was also driven to invest after seeing strengths in human capital and talent development. “I think it’s something in the educational system. The women are excelling,” Kherlopian says. A native of New Jersey, he completed his PhD in biophysics with a focus on machine learning at the Weill Cornell Graduate School of Medical Sciences. “The mathematical prowess you see here is now making its way into biotech,” Kherlopian observed from his new home in Yerevan. As one central example, he noted that in Armenia, “computational drug design, building medicines by computer, is making major strides.”
Jack Topdjian, a partner at Healthcare Equity Angels, a syndicated healthcare and biotech investment firm in Miami, says that something big is happening here. It compelled him to invest in the country and begin advising startups, looking for areas where the small landlocked country can excel. advertisement
“Several AI applications in biotechnology, personalized medicine, genomics, and agriculture are already making their way from the labs and early-stage companies to global markets,” he says. “The two areas that impressed me are the acceleration of R&D and precision medicine. It’s the combination of deep computational science across artificial intelligence, machine learning, advanced visualization, and quantum computing along with a deep expertise in medicine, biotechnology, and genomics fields,” Topdjian says. “You need these complex sciences working in tandem to make big breakthroughs happen.”
By leaning into that intersection he sees what he considers Armenia’s homegrown advantages: Its deep pool of human talent, relevant fields of advanced education, cost advantage, and diaspora connections to major research centers across the world. He predicts venture investment in the country could double by next year. Enter Roza Bejanyan, another female founder leading her country’s biotech surge. Her company, Medpoint Technologies , is building tools for earlier and more precise diagnosis of diseases including pediatric cancer, brain cancer, and lung cancer using digital pathology: AI algorithms applied to analyzing clinical samples. One of the company’s products is a bloodless, noninvasive AI-powered test based on nanostructures for early-stage lung cancer and respiratory diseases. advertisement
From her base in Yerevan, Bejanyan leveraged some powerful advantages in building her algorithms—foremost, a trove of biomedical data that was easier to access than in other countries. “In post-Soviet countries medical data is more centralized,” she says. “As long as the patient has agreed you can use their data.”
The second advantage was a deep pool of talent, specifically in the form of the well-trained pathologists who could collaborate with biotech startups. The presence of specialized pathologists in Armenia and surrounding countries has helped Bejanyan move forward faster with product development. “Data annotation was ​the most critical limitation in having the kind of data we need to train our AI model,” she says. “We need whole slide images of a biopsy, annotated and classified by a pathologist. . . . It’s impossible to generate a big amount of data without these advising pathologists.”
She is now turning those doctors into a product unto themselves, building a platform for pathologists in the region who can annotate biomedical data for tech companies around the world. The digital delivery of products and processes also makes it easier to form joint ventures: Denovo Sciences , an early-stage biotech company in Armenia, is collaborating with Emory University to codevelop therapies for hepatitis B and with the University of California, San Diego, to do the same for hepatitis C.
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Denovo uses AI to accelerate drug discovery. Irina Tirosyan, the company’s lead data scientist, is also a lecturer at the American University of Armenia, educating the next generation of specialists in her field. That is part of a unified strategy, led by Tirosyan and others at her company, to create a cadre of future hires and colleagues. “There’s a good talent pool when it comes to AI and data science, but it’s hard to find people at the crossroads of natural sciences and AI. We create our own talent acquisition pipeline,” Tirosyan says. Denovo started Cheminformatics Bootcamp to accelerate the process, teaching participants computational chemistry and data science for drug discovery. As the biotech ecosystem has grown, global technology firms have started to take advantage of Armenia’s talent pool. Vineti , a San Francisco-based company that produces enterprise software to manage personalized therapeutics, built a team of 60 people in Yerevan. That office handles engineering, product, and support, as well as human resources and administrative functions. advertisement
“Having a strong team in Armenia gives us significant advantages,” says Ann Klein, Vineti’s CEO. “Our Armenia team is an important part of working with our customers in Europe and Asia. Their perspective helps us understand our customers worldwide.” She has set up her Yerevan office in part to serve the relatively close Middle East and Indian markets. “Armenia is a perfect hub to serve all those regions with significant cost efficiencies compared to the U.S. and Europe,” Klein adds. The limitations of working in Armenia are like cliffs that the ecosystem is working to scale. As the founding director of the Armenian Bioinformatics Institute , Lilit Nersisyan and her colleagues are pulling together the labs and expensive machinery required to train Armenia’s next generation. advertisement
“We are still behind in terms of genomics infrastructure development,” Nersisyan says. The upshot: staying focused, for now, on the less equipment-intensive areas of data analysis and the benefit of a small, tight-knit ecosystem where interactions are easy and frequent. “We can [easily] collaborate across fields and find solutions to whatever problem is in front of us,” she says. “We can have a niche as an interdisciplinary workforce.”
Topdjian, the investor in Miami, says the key for Armenia is to develop specialized subfields of expertise, areas that leverage deep science to add value to the global health and biotech industry. This would track the role Armenia used to play before the fall of the Soviet Union, when it manufactured high-tech components for the wider country’s mechanical engineering and aviation industries and invented some of the world’s earliest computers. advertisement
Aram Salatian helped establish the Museum of Science and Technology in 2008, part of Yerevan’s Engineering City, to capture that history of research and innovation. “Our natural calling is to be a place for difficult and complex problems, problems that are not easy to be solved by the average specialist,” he says. “It’s the role that we historically and existentially have had to play.”
Reflecting on that track record helps motivate a new generation of science and mathematics brains in this small country. They are approaching the future with the confidence to take on the thorny, complex problems of their field; above all, the women founders I have met embody that grit and perseverance around a unique set of obstacles. With the inner drive and few crafty work-arounds, they are bent on creating things of high quality that appeal to the global field of health-tech investors. That is an attitude and approach worth betting on. Lara Setrakian is a journalist and impact investor based in Yerevan, Armenia. She is an Impact Partner with Fresco Capital, a global venture capital firm. She is on Twitter @lara . advertisement

In Armenia’s biotech boom, remarkable women are leading the way

Foundation for Armenian Science and Technology

CRRC-Armenia

Artificial Intelligence (AI)

Seed

Denovo Sciences is a deep technology company focused on creating novel therapeutics in the pharmaceutical industry. The company offers a platform that utilizes reinforcement learning algorithms to design and optimize chemical structures for drug discovery without the need for extensive training datasets. Denovo Sciences' technology enables the rational design of multitarget chemical structures, addressing complex diseases by modulating multiple biological targets. It was founded in 2019 and is based in Yerevan, Armenia.

Date	Round	Amount	Investors	Valuation Valuations are submitted by companies, mined from state filings or news, provided by VentureSource, or based on a comparables valuation model.	Revenue	Sources
10/18/2022	Seed	$0.2M	Berkeley SkyDeck, and Granatus Ventures	$XXM	0 FY undefined	1
	Other Investors		Subscribe to see more	$XXM	0 FY undefined	10

Date	10/18/2022
Round	Seed	Other Investors
Amount	$0.2M
Investors	Berkeley SkyDeck, and Granatus Ventures	Subscribe to see more
Valuation	$XXM	$XXM
Revenue	0 FY undefined	0 FY undefined
Sources	1	10

First funding	Last Funding	Investor	Rounds	Type	Location
10/18/2022	10/18/2022	Granatus Ventures	1 Seed	Venture Capital	Armenia
00/00/0000	00/00/0000	Berkeley SkyDeck	Subscribe to see more	Incubator/Accelerator	California
		Triple S Ventures	Subscribe to see more	Venture Capital	California
		Berkeley SkyDeck Europe-Milano	Subscribe to see more	Incubator/Accelerator	Italy

First funding	10/18/2022	00/00/0000
Last Funding	10/18/2022	00/00/0000
Investor	Granatus Ventures	Berkeley SkyDeck	Triple S Ventures	Berkeley SkyDeck Europe-Milano
Rounds	1 Seed	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more	Subscribe to see more
Board Seats
Type	Venture Capital	Incubator/Accelerator	Venture Capital	Incubator/Accelerator
Location	Armenia	California	California	Italy

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Denovo Sciences

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