Verisim Life, a San-Francisco based biotech startup, closed $5.2 million in a round of funding from firms including Intel Capital. Verisim acknowledges that the current process to bring a drug to clinical trials, let alone to market, involves a lot of animal testing that sees the majority of these drugs dismissed. As a result, the company has set out to develop disease-specific, machine learning based simulation models to test interactions between drugs and different animals' biological systems. This would dramatically decrease the time and cost required to take a drug to human clinical trials. This technology could one day be used to determine how a patient would react to a specific drug. As of now Verisim has just one published patent application, but this funding suggests there may be more applications that have been submitted, and provides financing for continued R&D.
