ENDPOINT NEWS EXCLUSIVE

Author: Andrew Dunn, Senior Biopharma Correspondent

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Ahead of the busiest week for bio­phar­ma deal­mak­ing at the an­nu­al JP Mor­gan Health­care Con­fer­ence, a new start­up launched, be­liev­ing its soft­ware will help pre­vent drug­mak­ers from miss­ing out on their next big deal.

With eight full-time em­ploy­ees, Pru­den­tia Sci­ences raised a $7 mil­lion seed round in the fall led by GV, the ven­ture arm of Al­pha­bet, CEO Sadiqa Mah­mood ex­clu­sive­ly told End­points News. Ia­so Ven­tures and Virtue are al­so in­vestors.

Pru­den­tia’s soft­ware mix­es large lan­guage mod­els, deep learn­ing neur­al net­works and fi­nan­cial mod­els to help speed up the due dili­gence and val­u­a­tion process­es at the heart of deal­mak­ing dis­cus­sions.

Mah­mood, a for­mer leader of the Broad In­sti­tute, found­ed the Cam­bridge, MA-based start­up in 2023. John Reyn­ders, a biotech vet­er­an and pre­vi­ous­ly Mod­er­na’s found­ing chief in­for­ma­tion of­fi­cer, joined last fall as chief tech­nol­o­gy of­fi­cer.

Mah­mood built the life sci­ences group at Health Cat­a­lyst, a health­care ser­vices com­pa­ny, when she said she no­ticed how slow and frag­ment­ed phar­ma de­ci­sion-mak­ing process­es are. She left Health Cat­a­lyst in late 2022, spend­ing the next sev­er­al months meet­ing with R&D and busi­ness de­vel­op­ment ex­ec­u­tives to learn about the biggest pain points in their jobs.

Pru­den­tia’s fo­cus emerged from those cof­fee chats af­ter Mah­mood re­peat­ed­ly heard “a deep frus­tra­tion with missed op­por­tu­ni­ties” for deals, she said. The start­up’s first goal is help­ing BD teams or in­sti­tu­tion­al in­vestors eval­u­ate more drugs faster by us­ing its soft­ware.

“Our fo­cus is speed, to start, be­cause most of the time, these dili­gence process­es run over weeks,” Mah­mood said. “We are try­ing to re­duce that to a week-long process, not more than that.”

Be­yond mak­ing dili­gence faster, Pru­den­tia’s soft­ware al­so an­a­lyzes deal val­u­a­tions by sim­u­lat­ing a key met­ric in phar­ma board­rooms: NPV, or net present val­ue. While wide­ly used, NPV al­so has its crit­ics, giv­en the myr­i­ad un­knowns baked in­to drug R&D. Pru­den­tia isn’t try­ing to up­end that ap­proach, but rather make it more ef­fi­cient.

“Our goal is not to change the cur­rent prac­tice,” Mah­mood said. “Our goal is to im­prove the process for de­ci­sion-mak­ing.”

Pru­den­tia is still in the ear­li­est stages as a start­up. While some of its own in­vestors are us­ing the soft­ware, Mah­mood de­clined to say if the com­pa­ny has any in­de­pen­dent cus­tomers or to share any de­tails on rev­enue.

LLMs play a role in Pru­den­tia’s soft­ware, but AI is on­ly part of the com­pa­ny’s ap­proach. Mah­mood said Pru­den­tia isn’t build­ing AI mod­els from scratch, but rather us­ing cus­tomiz­ing ex­ist­ing mod­els that are most help­ful.

“We did not want to just pig­gy­back on the LLM trend,” she said. “That was nev­er the in­ten­tion of the com­pa­ny. It was, ‘We need to solve this prob­lem. What are the tools and tech­nolo­gies out there?’ And that just hap­pens to be a part of it.”

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