Montreal-based Simmunone, a company that uses AI to predict whether drug candidates will succeed or fail in clinical trials, has announced it has closed a $2 million pre-seed funding round, according to BetaKit.

Simmunome and its team of molecular biology, bioinformatics, AI, and computational neuroscience experts are developing a software solution to perform clinical trials that are less time-consuming and expensive, and have better success rates.

“There is a lot of activity, there are a lot of dollars in this industry, but most importantly, there are human lives at the end of this.,” Armstrong Murira, co-founder of Simmunome, said.

Biotech and medtech-focused Theodorus Investment Funds led the funding round. It also saw participation from Fonds d’investissement Eurêka, BKR Capital, Sandpiper Ventures, and ACET Capital. No valuation was disclosed.

The capital comes in addition to a previous $25,000 simple agreement for future equity (SAFE) investment from Front Row Ventures and $600,000 in grant funding, according to BetaKit.

Murira said that only some competitors have been focused on disease biology in the clinical stage of the drug development process. This is even though many AI startups focused on pharmaceutical clinical trials have emerged, targeting the drug-molecule side of the equation.

“Now, we have the will and, I think, the computational resources to really start to try and tackle this perspective,” Murira told BetaKit in an interview.

Murira, a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology, learned personally about the “low success rates and really exorbitant costs” related to clinical studies while working in the field. He founded Simmunome with chief technology officer Nardin Nakhla, a neuroscientist with a PhD, to assist in solving this issue.

“That’s because biology is very complex and not very well understood,” she said.

In oncology, neurological illnesses, and regenerative medicine, the startup has created proprietary computational models to aid pharmaceutical firms and academic labs in understanding the biology of diseases like Alzheimer’s, melanoma, and others, according to BetaKit.

Simmunome customers can simulate whether specific medicines will suit particular people and conditions. Customers can also enter patient and drug data into Simmunome’s software to get forecasts tailored to their patients or discover trends or causal biomarkers based on their data. The company thinks that using this strategy will make clinical trials less risky, and there will be less need for testing on both humans and animals.

“The (Simmunome) team has developed a unique and innovative approach when it comes to evaluating the probability of a drug’s efficacy, allowing optimization of target selection at the early discovery phase in the clinical value chain,” Theodorus principal Théo Risopoulos said in a statement, according to BetaKit.