Meet Joern Klinger, CEO and Co-Founder of biotx.ai
Causal inference modeling at scale for drug discovery, repurposing and validation
We recently caught up with Joern Klinger, CEO and Co-Founder of biotx.ai, a biotech AI company that is applying causal modeling to drug development at scale, for drug discovery, repurposing and validation. Read more about Joern’s journey from Oxford and his personal story behind the founding of biotx.ai.
What did you study at Oxford?
I was a member of Linacre College where I completed a Masters in Computational Psychology from 2009-2010.
What was your most important takeaway from Oxford?
Beyond the great friends and connections I made, the work in computational psychology, and deep neural networks, in particular with the great Prof. Kim Plunkett and Dr. Julien Mayor, added the quantitative, computational perspective to my work that plays a major role in biotx.ai.
Did you always think you would be an entrepreneur?
I always wanted to give it a try.
What motivated you to start this company?
Throughout my Masters and PhD I had acquired skills that I deemed useful, but I held off on starting my own company, because I hadn’t yet had an idea that was challenging enough and had enough of an impact on the world. This changed when I met my co-founder, Dr. Marco Schmidt. He worked with the founders of the successful drug discovery company Astex, Chris Abell and Tom Blundell, in Cambridge, which opened his eyes to the biggest challenge in drug development: predicting efficacy in humans. Many drugs are safe and address the mechanism as intended, but end up not working in humans. When I met Marco in 2015, I realized that with my background from Oxford I could help solve this problem and the idea for biotx.ai was born.
What is the problem the company is solving?
Prediction of clinical success of drug candidates.
Why is this an important problem to solve?
The success rate of new drugs is unfortunately still less than 15%. While many drugs address a particular mechanism as intended, they fail to make it through clinical approval because they end up not working in humans.
How is the company solving the problem in an innovative way?
biotx.ai is the first to apply causal modeling in drug development at scale. At its core, our causal modeling mimics prospective, randomized clinical trials in large retrospective data – the genomes and full phenotypes and medical histories of 3.3 million patients. This allows for fast predictions of clinical success with huge statistical power, and, at scale, enables the discovery and validation of every mechanism and disease affected by a given drug. In practice biotx.ai has enabled clients to secure funding, explain the biology of their drugs and improve the design of their clinical trials.
What are the biggest struggles you have experienced as a founder?
As a founder I have to bring my peak performance and not be phased by stress for years at a time and not lose track of the long term vision. This has been unlike anything I encountered in the academic world.
I’ve learned that you have to be proud of your idea and learn as you go. You need to love learning as a process itself.
What has been your most rewarding accomplishment to date as a founder?
We’ve built a team that believes in what we do. We’re excited about our work.
Why is the Oxford Angel Fund excited about this investment?
We are excited about biotx.ai because there is a huge opportunity for increasing the success rate of drug development. The market opportunity for biotx.ai includes every drug developer (biotech and pharma companies), and beyond that also CROs (the companies that run clinical trials for pharmas) and private equity firms who want to invest in drug developers and need to do due diligence on their future investments. We are impressed by the team and are excited to see their traction. To learn more visit www.biotx.ai.
biotx.ai
Causal inference modeling at scale for drug discovery, repurposing and validation
Founders: Joern Klinger, Marco Schmidt, Charles Ravarani
Founded: 2017
Stage: Seed 2020
Notable Investors: Hoxton Ventures
Biotx.ai enables causal modeling at scale to enable drug discovery and repurposing via large-scale screening. This allows for fast predictions of clinical success with huge statistical power, and, at scale, enables the discovery and validation of every mechanism and disease affected by a given drug.