Eli Lilly has entered a three-year partnership with biotech company Verge Genomics to research and create new drugs for the treatment of amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a motor neuron disease. Verge developed an all-in-human, artificial-intelligence (AI)-driven drug discovery and development platform to develop treatments for serious genetic diseases. Based on patient brain transcriptomes across various neurodegenerative diseases, the platform offers insights into new causal disease mechanisms in genetically categorised patients to enable the discovery of therapeutic targets. The partnership will use Verge's all-in-human platform to discover and establish new targets for ALS. Lilly will choose up to four targets detected by Verge and will advance them into clinical trials and markets.

Verge Genomics is taking a novel approach to speed drug discovery for devastating neurodegenerative diseases such as Parkinson's, Alzheimer's and ALS. Rather than spending exhaustive time with animal testing, the San Francisco-based company goes straight to the source. "To succeed in humans, you need to start with humans," says CEO Alice Zhang, whose drug discovery combines artificial intelligence with human genomics. Animal testing can be successful in predicting success for some drugs, but when it comes to neurodegenerative diseases, human brains are far more complex. To keep human patients at the center of the drug discovery process, Zhang's company has built one of the largest databases of brain tissue sequences in the world, with tissue from more than 1,000 human brains.

Artificial intelligence (AI) is continuing to make waves in the life sciences industry, with today's announcement that a drug-discovery company called Verge Genomics has landed $32 million in Series A financing. Based in San Francisco, Verge Genomics uses machine learning and sprawling data sets to identify new therapeutics for neurological diseases. Since its founding in 2015, the startup has nurtured "lead therapeutic programs" and built proprietary genomic data sets for Parkinson's disease and amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Investors nodded to those advances and Verge Genomics' roster of diverse experts when they announced the windfall. Read: Which Health-Tech Startups Are Making Money in 2018?

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Verge Genomics, a drug discovery company utilizing machine learning to develop new therapeutics, announced today that it has raised $32 million in Series A financing led by DFJ. New biotech investors WuXi AppTec's Corporate Venture Fund, ALS Investment Fund, Agent Capital, and OS Fund also participated in the round. The oversubscribed round brings Verge's total funding raised to-date to more than $36 million. With this round, Emily Melton of DFJ will join Verge Genomics' Board of Directors. Founded in 2015, Verge intersects machine learning, neuroscience, and experimental biology to accelerate drug discovery.

While Alice Zhang was pursuing her PhD and MD at UCLA, she was shocked to learn a truth about drug research - 90% of medicines that start human trials fail. "It's still largely a guessing game," she says. Her startup, Verge Genomics, is working to use machine learning and genomic data to tackle neurological disorders. The 7-person company has raised $4 million so far and is working on development with several pharmaceutical companies. Zhang is just one of the outstanding scientists in this year's Forbes 30 Under 30 in Science list.