This sector-leading partnership underscores Relation’s incredible growth journey and is a testament to the power of Relation’s Lab-in-the-Loop platform and team.
At Magnetic Ventures we spend our days and nights thinking about the technology that will help deliver life saving therapies to patients sooner. We fundamentally believe a drug discovery approach which integrates patient-derived datasets, genetic perturbation studies, and machine learning has the potential to dramatically accelerate the discovery of novel drug targets and represents one of the greatest opportunities for value creation in biotech. In 2021, when Relation had three employees we led their Seed financing because we had high conviction for Relation’s mission to fuse experimental biology and machine learning and for Relation’s team, which includes world class scientists and drug discoverers. Now 70 employees strong, Relation has emerged as a global leader in TechBio generating world-class datasets and applying generative AI to design new molecules for targeted therapies, and executing two blockbuster deals with GSK.
Relation will receive an upfront payment of $45 million, which includes an equity investment of $15 million. In addition, Relation will be eligible to receive success-based collaboration payments of up to $63 million, and potential preclinical, development, commercial, and sales milestone payments averaging $300 million per target across both deals, as well as tiered royalties on net sales of products. This is the largest deal for a seed stage TechBio company as far as we know and is a testament to the power of Relation’s Lab-in-the-Loop platform and to the relentless work of Relation’s mission-driven team. It also adds another strategic investor in addition to NVIDIA’s NVentures who co-led a Seed extension with DCVC, who also led the original seed extension. Magnetic has participated in each round due to our unwavering conviction for the technology and team.
GSK saw in Relation what Magnetic saw, as echoed in their announcement. “Working with Relation enables us to gain deep and precise insights into human causal biology and apply these to therapeutic discovery through a data-driven approach, supported by Relation’s proprietary platform,” said Kaivan Khavandi, SVP, Global Head of Respiratory/Immunology R&D at GSK. “The resulting targets will be supported by robust translational packages, which will in-turn provide clarity on deployment in early clinical evaluation, ultimately supporting our broader portfolio ambition to develop new medicines for fibrotic diseases and osteoarthritis –where there remains significant unmet medical need”.
Relation’s success is predicated on the unique integration of several tenets: (1) multi-modal patient data, (2) perturbation studies that use multi-dimensional ‘-omics data’ as a readout (e.g. single cell sequencing to understand the transcriptional profile of genes), (3) machine learning, (4) cellular models that accurately recapitulate the disease being studied, and (5) high-performance experimental design and vast quantities of computational firepower. A huge advantage of Relation’s approach is the use of human genetics and their proprietary atlas of data generated directly from patient tissue. The team has built a compelling map of the underlying disease biology of osteoarthritis.
In this partnership with GSK, the team combines Relation’s strengths of using machine learning in pursuit of understanding the root cause driving disease, with GSK’s global scale and tremendous expertise in developing therapies for patients. Through this partnership, the team at Relation is minimizing the risk of clinical failures by ensuring their targets are rigorously evaluated both experimentally and using cutting-edge computational assessments before entering the clinic.
When we first wrote about Relation we stressed technology and team. To see what the team has accomplished in less than four years is more than impressive, it’s inspirational. In a relatively short period of time, Relation created Osteomics — the world’s largest single-cell atlas of the bone. This enabled the team to deeply characterize patient samples using single cell sequencing, proteomics, imaging, spatial genomics, and the clinical phenotypes of the patients themselves. By combining this information in one resource, the team uncovered new biology, therapeutic targets, biomarkers and the relevant patient subgroups who would benefit from their drug discovery approach.
The team has strategically focused on diseases where their drug discovery platform can be applied to opportunities where there is a well-validated path to the clinic, as demonstrated by this most recent partnership with GSK. Osteoarthritis is a debilitating degenerative joint disease that occurs when the cartilage and tissues in a joint break down. Millions of patients suffer from this painful condition and new treatments are essential.
The Relation team is quick to remind one another, “the patient is waiting.” This ethos is ever-present and we couldn’t be more delighted to be a partner alongside the other investors supporting Relation on its journey to deliver new therapies to patients sooner. #thepatientiswaiting
Christine, Jillian & Umut.