Scouring the plant world with AI for drug discovery

NATURE IS a prolific pharmacist. Aspirin, the blood thinner warfarin and metformin for diabetes all trace back to plants, discovered by serendipity before being transformed into drugs by modern chemistry.

- Damian Garde

Biotech's latest unicorn, the closely held firm Enveda, wants to shave a few centuries off the journey from nature to the medicine cabinet, using artificial intelligence to scour thousands of plants for potential next breakthroughs.

That promise helped the Boulder, Colorado, company close a $150 million Series D, Enveda said, lifting its valuation above $1 billion and bringing its total venture funding to $517 million. Enveda, founded in 2019, has already enrolled the first patient in its inaugural clinical trial, and it expects to move two more drugs into human studies in the months ahead.

The big idea, CEO Viswa Colluru said, is to pick up where evolution left off. Enveda began with some 38,000 plants found to have medicinal uses throughout human history, with the list subsequently winnowed down to roughly 12,000 that have persisted across cultures and continents. From there, the company breaks each into its microscopic component parts and feeds the results into its proprietary AI program, analyzing the fragments to figure out which might be responsible for the beneficial effects.