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Originally published on 03/21/2002
Entelos is one of a few companies that practices what's called "in silico" biology, which is a clever way to say the company models drugs against its computer simulations of biology, as opposed to testing drugs in the lab (in vitro) or on living subjects (in vivo).
Fast Facts:
Entelos
www.entelos.com |
| CEO |
James Karis. Last job: COO, Parexel. |
| HQ |
Menlo Park, CA |
| Employees |
85 |
| Market |
Drug discovery & development |
| Funding |
$46M; lead investor Health Innoventures |
| Profitable |
No |
| Runway |
Claimed: Indefinite, due to growing revenues from Pfizer, J&J, etc. |
This is far from simple. The body is a mass of complex interrelated systems, about which there is an awful lot we don't know. Even the best-understood pathways, when diagrammed, look like n-dimensional spaghetti code. Extracting useful results from modeling human biochemical process is quite a challenge.
This very uncertainty can be modeled, apparently. Entelos' data system uses a grammar that allows the description of just what's known about drugs, chemical pathways, and their effects on organ systems. The top-down, multivariate, nonlinear simulation is quite different from modeling, say, an airplane wing, in which a more complete understanding of mechanics and physics drives a bottom-up construction of the simulated universe.
Plugging this incomplete, and often contradictory information about biology and drugs into the system yields results that are surprisingly accurate, CEO James Karis says. Entelos has made two clinical predictions regarding asthma drugs, both of which were later verified in the field.
Some diseases are simpler than others. Smallpox and measles, for example, were relatively easy to understand and combat. Syndromes like AIDS and asthma are more complex and robust, much like the body's own integrated systems. Useful simulations of these diseases require not just a good base of information, but processors and algorithms powerful enough to crunch the data. Current technology has made this theoretical field practical.
- Rafe Needleman
email: rafe-needleman@catchoday.com
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