Sloan Alum Startup twoXAR Uses Big Data to Connect Diseases with Drugs
MIT Sloan School of Management recently published an article on biopharmaceutical firm twoXAR (pronounced “two czar”), launched by Sloan alumnus Andrew M. Radin (MBA ‘14) and Andrew A. Radin (no relation). The firm takes a big data approach to scan “the handful of drug candidates out of a drug library of thousands, if not millions, that would most effectively treat a specific disease.”
M. Radin says three factors have been instrumental in the success of twoXAR, which he and the fellow Radin founded when they met in Stanford’s biomedical informatics program. 1) The advent of cloud computing; 2) Major leaps in machine learning; and 3) “The amount and diversity of publicly available structured data from organizations like the National Institutes of Health.”
The twoXAR drug discovery platform applies big data to “find unanticipated associations between particular diseases and drugs that might be able to treat them, then analyze each of the identified candidate drugs to determine how effectively they could treat that disease.”
Sloan Professor Scott Stern was an early advisor to the project. “What I liked from the very beginning was that they had a clear, underlying hypothesis about how they would create value,” Stern said as part of the article. “They’re taking an abstract idea and turning it into a concrete implementation.”
It seems investors feel similarly about twoXAR: The company snagged $3.4 million in seed-round funding last November via the Andreessen Horowitz “bio fund,” CLI Ventures and StartX—Stanford’s incubator for startups.
A. Radin explains that twoXAR’s technology screens “large libraries of molecules in a matter of minutes against millions of data points spanning chemical, biological and clinical databases.” He elaborates that twoXAR’s technology is designed to “augment, not automate R&D and hopefully “shave years off of the standard drug development process.”
M. Radin believes that progress will only be possible through collaboration between man and machine; life science and data science. “Computation enables a speed and scale of analysis previously unavailable to medical research, and we have done this in our partnerships with disease researchers.”
So far, twoXAR has “completed a preclinical study of candidate drugs to treat rheumatoid arthritis and has since started research on a type of liver cancer known as hepatocellular carcinoma.”
About the Author
Jonathan Pfeffer
Jonathan Pfeffer joined the Clear Admit and MetroMBA teams in 2015 after spending several years as an arts/culture writer, editor, and radio producer. In addition to his role as contributing writer at MetroMBA and contributing editor at Clear Admit, he is co-founder and lead producer of the Clear Admit MBA Admissions Podcast. He holds a BA in Film/Video, Ethnomusicology, and Media Studies from Oberlin College.
