Network Bio Launches with $50 Million Financing and World’s Largest Patient Tissue Training Dataset
Funding advances a research network of leading U.S.-based academic biobanks which provides Network Bio with
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Network Bio, a biotechnology company building disease-specific AI models from human biological data to support the personalized practice of medicine, launched today with $50 million in financing. Investors include Section 32, Thiel Bio, Founders Fund, Breyer Capital, Blue Venture Fund, JSL Health Capital and other life science and AI funds.
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Network Bio Co-Founders Asad Ahmad, CEO, and Raphael Potter.” Photo credit: Network Bio
The financing will support expansion of Network Bio’s life science platform, which develops disease-specific AI models trained on large scale tissue, blood, molecular and clinical datasets. By leveraging a network of academic biobanks, Network Bio is creating an unprecedented disease-focused dataset on which to train new AI models to advance human health.
Network Bio’s Research Network of Leading U.S. Biobanks
Through collaboration with leading academic medical centers, including Mass General Brigham, the University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Colorado Anschutz, the company has created a research network of large biobanks. Common selection criteria, sample quality standards, and data harmonization across sites make it possible to generate “AI-ready” datasets that combine multiple layers of data from patient tissue and blood samples with longitudinal clinical outcomes at a scale that is not possible working with a single institutional biobank.
Network Bio has a demonstrated track record of building these data atlases, drawing on patient-derived tissue paired with blood samples, longitudinal clinical outcomes, and multimodal molecular data. Following data harmonization and integrated analyses, generated data are returned to commercial partners and its collaborating institutions, supporting basic science and biomedical research at participating U.S. academic medical centers.
“Every patient leaves a barcode of their disease in their tissue, and until now no one has been able to read those barcodes at scale,” said Asad Ali Ahmad, Ph.D., CEO and Co-Founder, Network Bio. “Working with the biobanks of some of the country’s leading academic medical centers, we built the network that makes reading them possible. We then built an AI platform that is already finding signals in conditions it was never trained on. This is the future of medicine.”
“No single academic medical center can capture the full complexity of human disease,” said Kimberly Muller, Chief Innovation Officer, CU Anschutz Innovations. “By bringing together biobanks from leading institutions with industry partners, Network Bio is creating a research resource that reflects diverse patient populations and supports discoveries that can translate into real-world clinical practice.”
AI Platform Designed to Learn the Biology of Disease
Unlike conventional AI systems built for a single disease or application, Network Bio is developing an AI infrastructure that is capable of learning biological principles that transfer across diseases, tissues and data modalities. The company’s vertically integrated platform combines two foundational technologies:
- A biological research network that sources, links and structures tissue, blood and longitudinal clinical outcomes from leading academic medical centers to create AI-ready biological datasets.
- Bio-native AI architecture that is purpose-built to learn from multimodal biological data, overcome technical confounders and generate interpretable representations of disease biology that generalize across diseases, with peer-reviewed research published in top-tier journals, including Nature Machine Intelligence.
Network Bio’s platform has demonstrated potential across multiple disease areas, including published results in respiratory disease and additional studies in ovarian and bone disease. These studies illustrate the platform’s ability to transfer learning across diseases, including in settings with limited or previously unseen datasets.
Network Bio has established early commercial validation through a strategic collaboration valued at more than $30 million with a Fortune-100, top-10 healthcare company to develop next-generation AI models. The collaboration represents an important milestone in applying the Company’s multimodal AI model to real-world clinical applications.
“Medicine is approaching an inflection point where AI can fundamentally change how biomedical discovery is done,” said Mike Pellini, M.D., Managing Partner at Section 32 and Chairman of Network Bio’s Board of Directors. “What differentiates Network Bio is the combination of the network of academic medical center biobanks with an AI architecture built for medicine. Rather than building models one disease at a time, the company is building General Medical Intelligence that becomes more capable with every new biological question it answers.”
“We built Network Bio based on the belief that AI and data hold the keys to advancing the human condition. We have been focused tirelessly on the dual mandate of gaining access to the tissue datasets which explain disease and building the AI systems capable of interpreting the complex results,” said Network Bio co-founders, Hani Goodarzi, Ph.D. and Raphael Potter.
“Clinical care is the largest biological experiment ever conducted, and we have no system for learning from it at scale,” said Morgan Cheatham, M.D., Partner at Breyer Capital. “Network Bio pairs deep molecular and clinical phenotyping with tissue and longitudinal outcomes at leading US academic medical centers. The platform enables fundamental mechanistic understanding of human health and disease, compounding at every layer of the stack: data, intelligence, diagnostics, therapeutics.”
About Network Bio
Network Bio is a biotechnology company building disease-specific AI models from human biological data to support the personalized practice of medicine. Through collaborations with U.S.-based academic medical centers, the company has connected data spanning immunology, metabolic, cardiovascular, auto-immune disease, among others. By integrating this biological foundation with AI purpose-built for medicine, Network Bio is developing technologies designed to accelerate diagnostics, biomarker discovery and drug development. For more information, visit www.network.bio.
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