Flagship Pioneering Announces Valo Health to Transform Drug Development

BOSTON, MA (Sep­tem­ber 24, 2020) – Flag­ship Pio­neer­ing today announced the launch of Valo Health, LLC (Valo), a drug dis­cov­ery tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny set­ting out to trans­form how oncol­o­gy, neu­rode­gen­er­a­tive, and car­dio­vas­cu­lar dis­ease drugs are cre­at­ed, devel­oped, and approved.

Found­ed and ini­tial­ly cap­i­tal­ized by Flag­ship Pio­neer­ing in 2019, Valo received addi­tion­al fund­ing from investors, bring­ing total financ­ing to near­ly $100m. Valo’s Opal Com­pu­ta­tion­al Plat­form^TM is a first-of-its-kind, end-to-end drug devel­op­ment plat­form, which inte­grates machine learn­ing, cloud com­put­ing, and data to cre­ate an entire­ly new drug dis­cov­ery and devel­op­ment process.

“New bio­log­i­cal and chem­i­cal exper­i­men­tal plat­forms and the appli­ca­tion of advanced com­put­ing to inte­grate human data can shave years off drug devel­op­ment and improve the like­li­hood of suc­cess” said Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., founder and CEO of Flag­ship Pio­neer­ing. ​“In a phar­ma­ceu­ti­cal indus­try where fail­ure is too often the rule, our goal with Valo is to change how drugs are devel­oped and to bring more pre­dic­tive con­fi­dence to clin­i­cal tri­al design and execution.”

Valo’s Opal Com­pu­ta­tion­al Plat­form^TM allows the company’s sci­en­tists to ana­lyze human data to uncov­er pre­vi­ous­ly unsus­pect­ed asso­ci­a­tions between genet­ic mark­ers and dis­ease with a human-cen­tric fram­ing, enabling the inte­grat­ed dis­cov­ery and devel­op­ment of pro­pri­etary new molecules.

“At the core of Valo’s approach is a recog­ni­tion that human-cen­tric data cou­pled with lead­ing-edge com­pute can enable a trans­for­ma­tion in how drugs are cre­at­ed, reduc­ing cost and time, while increas­ing con­fi­dence,” said Valo CEO David Berry, who is also a Gen­er­al Part­ner at Flag­ship Pio­neer­ing. ​“We found­ed Valo with the goal of redefin­ing the drug devel­op­ment process so that we can treat some of the world’s most chal­leng­ing ill­ness­es more quick­ly and more effec­tive­ly than ever before.”

Dur­ing its first year, Valo com­plet­ed two major acqui­si­tions to help dri­ve the company’s strat­e­gy. Numer­ate, acquired in Sep­tem­ber 2019, and assets from FOR­MA Ther­a­peu­tics, acquired in March 2020. Numerate’s engi­neers, now part of Valo’s team, cre­at­ed a plat­form with over 30,000 mod­els and over 70 tril­lion mol­e­cules that pow­ered more than 25 drug pro­grams. Through FOR­MA Ther­a­peu­tics, Valo acquired a high­ly skilled team, research and devel­op­ment com­pounds and libraries, a glob­al intel­lec­tu­al prop­er­ty port­fo­lio, and two ear­ly dis­cov­ery labs.

“Valo is tak­ing a ground­break­ing approach to solv­ing some of the most com­plex and dynam­ic issues in drug devel­op­ment,” said Ron Hov­sepi­an, Valo Board Chair­man, and Flag­ship Exec­u­tive Part­ner. ​“David Berry’s lead­er­ship as an inno­va­tor posi­tions Valo to shape how the next gen­er­a­tion of drugs will come to mar­ket. We are excit­ed to see what comes next.”

About Valo

Valo is an ear­ly-stage tech­nol­o­gy com­pa­ny found­ed by Flag­ship Pio­neer­ing in 2019 that is using cloud com­put­ing as well as lon­gi­tu­di­nal and human data to cre­ate an entire­ly new drug dis­cov­ery and devel­op­ment process. Through Valo’s Opal Com­pu­ta­tion­al Plat­form^TM a cloud gen­er­a­tion, ful­ly-inte­grat­ed, com­po­nen­tized, end-to-end drug devel­op­ment plat­form, drug devel­op­ment is posi­tioned to be trans­formed into a far more effi­cient process with life-chang­ing treat­ments cre­at­ed in poten­tial­ly half the time at far less cost and with far few­er fail­ures. The Opal Plat­form makes it pos­si­ble for sci­en­tists to review human data to dis­cov­er pre­vi­ous­ly unsus­pect­ed asso­ci­a­tions between genet­ic mark­ers and dis­ease and design and dis­cov­er pro­pri­etary new molecules.

About Flag­ship Pioneering

Flag­ship Pio­neer­ing con­ceives, cre­ates, resources, and devel­ops first-in-cat­e­go­ry life sci­ences com­pa­nies to trans­form human health and sus­tain­abil­i­ty. Since its launch in 2000, the firm has applied a unique hypoth­e­sis-dri­ven inno­va­tion process to orig­i­nate and fos­ter more than 100 sci­en­tif­ic ven­tures, result­ing in over $34 bil­lion in aggre­gate val­ue. To date, Flag­ship is backed by more than $4.4 bil­lion of aggre­gate cap­i­tal com­mit­ments, of which over $1.9 bil­lion has been deployed toward the found­ing and growth of its pio­neer­ing com­pa­nies along­side more than $10 bil­lion of fol­low-on invest­ments from oth­er insti­tu­tions. The cur­rent Flag­ship ecosys­tem com­pris­es 41 trans­for­ma­tive com­pa­nies, includ­ing Axcel­la Health (NAS­DAQ: AXLA), Denali Ther­a­peu­tics (NAS­DAQ: DNLI), Evelo Bio­sciences (NAS­DAQ: EVLO), Foghorn Ther­a­peu­tics, Indi­go Ag, Kalei­do Bio­sciences (NAS­DAQ: KLDO), Mod­er­na (NAS­DAQ: MRNA), Rubius Ther­a­peu­tics (NAS­DAQ: RUBY), Sana Biotech­nol­o­gy, Seres Ther­a­peu­tics (NAS­DAQ: MCRB), Sig­ilon Ther­a­peu­tics, and Syros Phar­ma­ceu­ti­cals (NAS­DAQ: SYRS).