Violet Therapeutics snags $10.6M to go beyond single-cell sequencing

Preclinical biotech Violet Therapeutics emerged from stealth Wednesday with a $10.6 million seed round for its platforms that go beyond single-cell sequencing (allowing researchers to zoom into what’s unfolding in an individual cell) by identifying cell-cell interactions for target and mechanisms of action discovery.

The first drug discovery programs will focus on diseases affecting the central nervous system, Violet co-founder Francisco Quintana said in a statement. Violet, founded in 2021, will also focus on multiple neurodegenerative indications, including Alzheimer’s disease.

The Dementia Discovery Fund led the seed round, marking its first investment from its latest fund, the Dementia Discovery Fund 2.

“Our novel platforms for the study of cell-cell interactions provide unique and novel insights into disease biology, identifying new therapeutic targets in multiple disease areas spanning neurodegeneration, as well as inflammation and oncology,” Quintana said in a statement.

Jon Behr

Jon Behr, a partner at the Dementia Discovery Fund, told Endpoints News that Violet wants to move beyond looking at cellular heterogeneity, or the variety of different cells and mutations, “to getting that spatial and potentially temporal context.”

“That is going to be critical to really understanding the biology in a tissue as opposed to biology in a cell, and disease biology,” Behr added. “The first iteration of the platform, the company has been building upon that to expand the utility to remodel systems, organs and tissues.”

Violet sprang from a collaboration with entrepreneurs and scientists from Brigham and Women’s Hospital and Mass General Brigham Ventures with a first focus on neuroscience targets and platforms that can map the cell.

One of Violet’s discovery platforms and the foundational platform for the company, dubbed RABID-Seq, use barcoded viral tracing to provide insights into cell-cell interactions. According to Behr, the plan is to build upon RABID-Seq and apply it to other tissues and diseases.

“The value proposition for this platform is to give you that spatial information, and potentially even temporal information about the context of that single cell biology,” Behr said. “How it works is fundamentally you use engineered viruses that are bar-coded like a DNA-encoded library or like any other barcode library so that you can understand which cells are physically interacting.”

The round was co-led by the University of Tokyo Edge Capital Partners. Founding investor Mass General Brigham Ventures and Ono Venture Investment also joined the funding round.

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