Emulate Inc., has secured a $36 million Series C financing round led by Founders Fund. With the financing transaction, Aaron VanDevender, Chief Scientist and Principal at Founders Fund, joins Emulate’s board of directors.
Founders Fund is a leading Bay Area venture capital firm whose partners have founded and funded companies including PayPal, Facebook and SpaceX.
Emulate creates living products for understanding how diseases, medicines, chemicals, and foods affect human health. The founding Emulate team pioneered the Organs-on-Chips technology at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and holds worldwide exclusive license.
The Human Emulation System™ is an Organs-on-Chips technology that recreates true-to-life human biology and is being used to advance product innovation, design, and safety across a range of applications including drug development, agriculture, cosmetics, food, and chemical-based consumer products.
Among other projects, Emulate is working with clinical partners to produce Organ-Chips personalized with an individual patient’s stem cells, for applications in precision medicine and personalized health.
“Emulate is energized and inspired to be among the companies in the Founders Fund portfolio,” … “At this next stage of our company’s growth, we are expanding our product portfolio, as well as building our commercial-readiness and community support team to drive integration of our platform by early adopters in the pharmaceutical industry.” – Geraldine A. Hamilton, President and Chief Scientific Officer of Emulate.
“The dependence of drug development on animal models for safety and efficacy testing has hit a wall.” … “As therapeutic approaches become ever more precise and complex, the limitations of legacy animal models increasingly prevent accurate predictions of drug responses in humans. This crisis has simultaneously put patients at risk of unpredictable side effects while inhibiting the approval of novel life-saving therapies. Emulate’s platform uses human cells to recapitulate human physiology, enabling the development of safer, more efficacious drugs. We believe its adoption by drug developers is a scientific, commercial, and moral imperative.” – Aaron VanDevender.
Source: