By her own admission, Elizabeth Wood is far from a typical biotech CEO.
Fittingly, she’s building an unconventional startup in JURA Bio, which announced on Thursday a $16.1 million seed round to bring machine learning into developing cell therapies. Wood co-founded JURA back in 2017 alongside Julie Norville, an MIT bioengineering PhD who is JURA’s chief technology officer.
The Harvard biologist George Church is also a founder, telling
Endpoints News
he expects JURA to play a role in an “amazing revolution” that applies machine learning to complex libraries of drug candidates. He says JURA is one of six biotechs he has founded around that theme. Others include
Shape Therapeutics
for RNA editing,
Dyno Therapeutics
on optimizing AAV vectors,
Nabla Bio
for designing antibodies, and
Manifold Bio
for protein therapeutics.