en.Wedoany.com Reported - Gero has secured $17 million in new funding to advance its AI-driven drug discovery platform focused on aging and chronic diseases. The AI-powered biotechnology company uses physics-based models to study aging and chronic conditions. With this funding round, the company's total equity financing has reached $34 million. The Singapore and San Francisco-based firm stated that the proceeds will support the preclinical development of its pipeline and expand pharmaceutical partnerships.
Gero previously entered into a collaboration with Chugai Pharmaceutical, a member of the Roche Group, including upfront payments and milestone payments of up to $250 million, in addition to royalties. Under this collaboration, Chugai is developing drug candidates targeting the targets identified by Gero. Additionally, Gero conducted a research collaboration with Pfizer in 2023.
The company's platform is based on the core concept that aging and the onset of age-related diseases follow patterns that can be modeled from human health data. Gero told MobihealthNews in a statement that its aging strategy takes a reverse approach, noting that most in the field focus on reversing aging. The physics-based method they employ suggests that slowing aging is a more manageable and powerful path, pointing out that nature's longest-lived and most resilient mammals, such as naked mole rats, also follow this strategy.
Gero stated that the funding is primarily used to transition from the discovery phase to the resource-intensive development phase. The company said it leverages large-scale longitudinal real-world data to build AI models of human health, integrating clinical, molecular, omics, and genetic signals with physics-based modeling to directly identify targets in human data. These targets are then validated in recognized disease models, ensuring that biology is human-based from the outset, rather than extrapolated from a single model organism. According to the company, the next batch of projects considered for preclinical development includes oncology and fibrosis.
Gero CEO and co-founder Peter Fedichev said the company extracted mathematical laws of aging from tens of millions of longitudinal health records and integrated them with molecular, omics, and genetic data. He believes aging is the shared engine behind nearly all chronic diseases, meaning that slowing aging is the highest-leverage intervention in human health. While focusing on aging, chronic diseases remain a major driver of healthcare needs. According to data from the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), over 90% of U.S. adults aged 65 and older have at least one chronic disease, while more than three-quarters of adults aged 35 to 64 have at least one. The CDC also notes that the U.S. population is aging, with nearly a quarter of the population expected to be 65 or older by 2060. Aging increases the risk of chronic diseases, including dementia, heart disease, type 2 diabetes, arthritis, and cancer.
Gero is one of several companies applying AI, longitudinal human data, and multi-omics analysis to drug discovery for age-related or chronic diseases. Another is BioAge Labs, whose platform is built around decades-long human aging cohorts, combining health records, functional measurements, analytics, and machine learning to identify targets associated with healthspan and age-related diseases.
This article is compiled by Wedoany. All AI citations must indicate the source as "Wedoany". If there is any infringement or other issues, please notify us promptly, and we will modify or delete it accordingly. Email: news@wedoany.com
