Dublin biotech backed by pharma and tech executives expands its Irish R&D team and strengthens its US and European footprint.
Meta-Flux, an Irish biotech startup using artificial intelligence to improve drug development accuracy, has raised €1.8 million in seed funding backed by senior executives from Pfizer, Merck, and Gilead Sciences, alongside tech leaders from Google, Amazon, and Indeed.
Founded in 2021 by immunologist Lee Sherlock and CTO Brendan Martin, Meta-Flux has developed a biology-first AI platform that simulates disease mechanisms to help pharmaceutical companies identify optimal drug applications and improve the accuracy of preclinical predictions.
“The goal isn’t that we get more drugs to market, it’s that we get more accuracy on the drugs that we do bring to market” ~ Sherlock, CEO of Meta-Flux.
Drug development remains a high-risk and high-cost process, with an estimated $2 billion average cost per successful launch and only one in 100,000 candidates reaching patients. Meta-Flux’s technology models complex biological interactions to improve prediction reliability, potentially saving time and resources in early-stage research.
In early pilot collaborations with Mercury, a biotech firm, Meta-Flux said it successfully identified novel biomarkers and flagged preclinical risks. The company has since converted its pilot programs into multi-year commercial contracts, following more than four years of R&D.
A senior R&D director at Gilead Sciences commented: “Over the next 12 to 18 months, I expect AI to transform preclinical research, accelerate discovery, improve prediction accuracy and reduce costs. The key for big pharma is identifying valuable AI partners who marry deep biological insight with advanced modeling.”
With the new funding, Meta-Flux plans to expand its technical team in Ireland to eight specialists and deepen its partnerships across the US and Europe. The company recently graduated from Techstars Chicago powered by JP Morgan, MassBio Drive in Boston, and NDRC at Dogpatch Labs, where Dogpatch founder Patrick Walsh now serves as a strategic adviser.
“There’s real potential to build a strong technical nucleus in Ireland that can support pharma companies on both sides of the Atlantic” Sherlock added.