AI drug testing startup Sable Bio raises £1.5m

Sable Bio, a London-based B2B biotech startup, has raised £1.5m in a pre-seed funding round for its drug safety testing technology.

Founded in 2023, Sable Bio uses AI to analyse broad sets of biomedical data to test potential medicines for toxicity. The data is then given to drug developers to inform safety decisions.

Now backed by pre-seed funding, the startup is looking to build out its core technological infrastructure.

“This investment will help Sable Bio redefine drug safety assessment and change the ways actionable biomedical insights are generated,” said co-founder Josh Almond-Thynne.

The investment round was led by Episode 1 Ventures and featured participation from Seedcamp.

“The advent of LLMs [large language models] is a monumental technological shift that will help Sable Bio unlock swathes of data previously inaccessible within the scientific literature, ultimately reducing the time-to-market and costs associated with clinical trials,” said Episode 1 partner Adam Shuaib.

Tom Wilson, a partner at Seedcamp added: “Taking drugs to market from discovery to development and beyond takes far too long and toxicity is a major factor adding delays or causing such processes to fail entirely.

“Sable is perfectly positioned to solve this problem by providing access to the right data at the right time to those who need it, leveraging LLMs to surface data that would have previously been impossible to cover fully.”

Following the funding round, Sable Bio will seek partnerships with biotech and pharma companies, as well as universities. The firm is also looking to grow its team with a round of hiring.