Valo Health closes $190m Series B led by PSP Investments

Boston-based Valo Health, a technology company that uses human-centric data and machine learning for drug discovery and development, has closed a $190 million Series B financing. The round was led by Canadian pension fund PSP Investments. It was joined by new and existing investors, including Flagship Pioneering, Invus Public Equities, HBM Healthcare Investments, Atinum Investment and Mirae Asset Capital.

PRESS RELEASE

BOSTON, Jan. 11, 2021 /PRNewswire/ — Valo Health LLC (Valo), the technology company working to transform the drug discovery and development process and accelerate the creation of life-changing drugs, closed a $190 million Series B financing and unveiled select therapeutic programs. Valo will further discuss these programs at the 39th Annual J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference on January 12, 2021, at 4:20 PM EST (link below).
Valo is creating a new systemic approach for drug discovery and development. By combining its unique human-centric dataset (over 125-million patient-years) with its Opal Computational Platform™ Valo is bringing the power of patient data and machine learning compute across the entire drug development lifecycle. The result of this systemic approach has been the rapid development of several key preclinical programs that have made significant progress on notoriously intractable to target therapeutic profiles, a few initial examples from Valo’s oncology portfolio include:

NAMPT: An opportunity enabled by developing a therapeutic that uniquely avoids target-associated mechanistic toxicology, enabling treatment of key hematological and solid tumor malignancies through a synthetic lethal cancer metabolism approach.
PARP1: A key protein involved in DNA repair and programmed cell death that has been clinically validated; centrally penetrant inhibitor to unlock potential treatment of brain metastases, glioblastoma, and other brain tumors.

USP28: A deubiquitinase where selective and specific targeting enabled by Opal can enable a targeted approach of c-myc driven cancers.

HDAC3: A potential first-in-class opportunity to enable a synthetic lethality approach to treating particular solid tumors.

“We have made tremendous progress in creating a fully integrated platform to accelerate the drug discovery and development process, making it far more efficient and less costly to provide life-saving treatments to patients,” said Valo Founder & CEO, David Berry. “In less than two years, we have been able to build out our Opal computational platform and make significant progress on a number of programs, driving towards our ultimate goal of helping patients suffering from major diseases within our three therapeutic areas of focus, cancer, cardiovascular disease, and neurodegenerative disease. We are pleased to share some of the progress we have made in our path to new cancer therapeutics with the combined power of Opal, massive data, and a world-class team of experts.”

Valo raised $190M in preferred equity capital through a Series B financing, bringing its total capital raised to over $285M. The financing was led by The Public Sector Pension Investment Board (PSP Investments). Joining the Series B financing are all of Valo’s existing major investors including Flagship Pioneering and several new institutional investors including Invus Public Equities, HBM Healthcare Investments, Atinum Investment, and Mirae Asset Capital. The proceeds from the Series B will support the continued discovery and development of therapeutic programs and will further build-out of the Company’s proprietary Opal Computational Platform, working capital, and other general purposes.

“We are entering a period of monumental growth and evolution in the biotech industry,” said Eduard van Gelderen, Senior Vice President and Chief Investment Officer, PSP Investments.”PSP is keen to invest in innovative, cutting-edge technology that can improve people’s lives.We are proud to support the extraordinary work that Valo is doing to identify ways to accelerate the creation of therapeutics for some of the world’s most complex diseases.”

Valo’s Opal Computational Platform™ is the first-of-its-kind, end-to-end drug development platform that fully integrates human-centric data and artificial intelligence/machine learning, to accelerate the drug discovery and development process. Using Opal, Valo scientists have been able to identify previously unsuspected associations between genetic markers and disease, which identify the specific changes in gene activity with an initial focus on oncology, neurodegenerative, and cardiovascular diseases.

The live audio (non-video) direct link for David Berry’s virtual session at the J.P. Morgan Healthcare Conference on January 12, 2021, at 4:20 can be accessed using the following:
https://jpmorgan.metameetings.net/events/healthcare21/sessions/35837-valo-health/webcast?gpu_only=true&kiosk=true

About Valo
Valo Health, LLC (Valo) is a technology company that is using human-centric data and machine learning-anchored computation to transform the drug discovery and development process. By integrating data across the drug development lifecycle, the discovery and development of life-changing treatments can be accelerated, with the potential to reduce cost, time, and failure rate. The company’s Opal Computational Platform™, a fully integrated, componentized, end-to-end drug development platform, offers a unique approach to therapeutic development, that enables Valo to advance a robust pipeline of candidates across cardiovascular disease, oncology, and neurodegeneration. Founded by Flagship Pioneering and headquartered in Boston, MA, Valo has offices in Watertown, MA, San Francisco, CA, Princeton, NJ, and in Branford, CT. To learn more, visit www.valohealth.com.