Pi Campus has closed an investment in InSilicoTrials, an Italian startup that allows pharma and medical devices companies to significantly decrease R&D costs (from 40% to 60%) and reduce regulatory approval times (from months to hours) thanks to its cloud-based platform for modeling and simulation. We took part in a 3 million Euro Series A round led by United Ventures.
The startup is led by serial entrepreneur Luca Emili, a member of the Cloud Security Consultative Group of European Medicines Agency and a leader in the Avicenna Alliance, an association for predictive medicine that brings together research organizations and industry leaders. Head of R&D is co-founder Roberta Bursi, a Ph.D. in computational chemistry with over 25 years of experience in the drug and med-tech sector.
Today only 5 out of 100 potential drugs reach the market, on average after 12 years and spending up to 2.6 billion dollars in experimentation and dialogue with the regulatory authorities. The global in-silico drug discovery market, now valued around 2 billion dollars, is estimated to reach 4,58 billion dollars in 5 years thanks to cost and time reduction that will make it possible to quickly evaluate and eliminate from the development cycle all products that do not have the potential to reach the market, focusing investments on those that can instead make it.
“One of the things we love in InSilicoTrials is that they kept the head-quarter in Italy while opening up offices in the US and Netherlands to push the expansion of the company. This investment confirms our intentions to keep the focus on the local startup ecosystem during this difficult period and invest in projects for which being based in Italy represents a plus,” says Marco Trombetti, CEO of Pi Campus.
As a matter of fact, InSilicoTrials is based in Trieste, a city with a strong scientific tradition, a very high concentration of scientific institutions, and the highest percentage of researchers per inhabitants in Europe (35 every 1,000 workers vs an average of 6). Additional confirmation of the role the city plays in the European scientific community comes from its nomination to City of Science 2020 and host of ESOF2020, the largest European conference on science and technology.
