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Israeli biotech firm Cassidy Bio raises $8m for AI gene therapies
Cassidy Bio, a biotechnology company based in Tel Aviv, has launched with US$8 million in seed funding to develop an AI-driven genomic platform for gene editing therapies.
The investment round was led by Ahren Innovation Capital, with participation from Lool Ventures, 10D VC, and AION Lab’s venture seeding track from AstraZeneca and Merck KGaA.
Cassidy Bio’s platform integrates machine learning, wet-lab data, and population-scale genomics to predict effective gene editing designs.
The company was founded by Rom Kshuk, Ayal Hendel, and Yaniv Shmueli, and its scientific advisory board includes former executives from Editas Medicine and Ultima Genomics, a current academic from the University of Pennsylvania, and a former adviser from Intellia Therapeutics.
Cassidy Bio aims to address challenges in gene editing such as target selection, delivery, efficacy, and specificity, seeking to move beyond manual trial-and-error approaches in therapy development.
🔗 Source: Cassidy Bio
🧠 Food for thought
Implications, context, and why it matters.
Biobanks with commercial genomic data access create partnership opportunities
- AI gene-editing platforms need population-scale genomic-phenotypic datasets (DNA data paired with observable traits and clinical outcomes) plus longitudinal clinical records (follow-up over many years) to train models. Data platform and computational biology companies can target Israeli biobanks with industry access to form partnerships that speed AI model development 2.
- Israel’s national biobank Psifas, a repository of biological samples linked to health records, links 20-plus years of electronic health records with whole genome sequencing from hundreds of thousands of consented patients across diverse ethnic groups 3.
- TLV BioBank at Tel Aviv Sourasky Medical Center, a hospital-based repository, offers academia and industry researchers access to biospecimens (human biological samples) with de-identified clinical data (personal identifiers removed) after ethics approval for feasibility work plus sample requests 2.
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