Israeli innovation lab backed by pharmaceutical, biotech giants mints 1st AI startup

An Israeli biotechnology innovation lab set up last year and backed by some of the world's leading pharmaceutical companies like Pfizer and Merck has formed a new startup that will harness artificial intelligence (AI) to assess drug efficacy in pre-clinical trials and improve chances for success in later stages. The startup, OMEC.AI, is the first company established with funding and support from AION Labs, a Rehovot-based organization launched last October with a mission to create and invest in early-stage startups focused on AI and computational biology in drug discovery and development. AION Labs is a collaboration between pharmaceutical giants Pfizer, AstraZeneca, Merck, and Teva Pharmaceuticals, together with Amazon's AWS and the Israel Biotech Fund, and is headed by Mati Gill, a former senior executive at Teva, and Dr. Yair Benita, the former head of computational biology at Compugen, science operations at CytoReason, and principal scientist at MSD (Merck). AION Labs ran three bootcamps over the past year to field scientist founders and inventors focused on addressing key industry challenges identified by the global pharma companies such as designing antibodies for targeted therapeutics and analyzing data using AI to assess and predict the clinical readiness of drug candidates. The latter challenge produced OMEC.AI, founded this summer with $2 million (NIS 7 million) in seed funding by AI experts Ori Shachar and Amir Harel, both of whom previously led AI teams at Mobileye, Intel's Jerusalem-based autonomous driving subsidiary.