Announcing InterVenn BioSciences

Today I am very excited to announce Amplify Partner’s investment in InterVenn BioSciences, a company leveraging mass spectrometry-based glycoproteomics and artificial intelligence to enable biomarker discovery and disease diagnosis.

Our excitement for InterVenn begins with an exceptionally talented founding team led by CEO Aldo Carrascoso and fellow co-founders Lieza Danan-Leon, Carlito Lebrilla, and Carolyn Bertozzi. InterVenn is one of the first and only teams both brave and competent enough to deliver a computational proteomics platform. Although strong evidence supports the causal role of proteins in disease pathology, large-scale analysis of proteins has been costly and time-consuming and access to high-quality, consistent proteomics data has been limited. However, the InterVenn team is uniquely positioned to innovate in this field by balancing scientific rigor with technological agility. With intellectual heavyweights in mass spectrometry and artificial intelligence, the InterVenn team is building automated sample preparation, cloud-based quality control, and deep learning algorithms to overcome these bottlenecks and scale from the biomedical research laboratory into the clinic.

At Amplify, we believe that new computing technologies and artificial intelligence will enable the development of lower cost, higher quality, more personalized diagnostics, and therapies. However, most companies using AI for biomarker discovery are focused on genomics despite the fact that genomics don’t tell the full story and remain mostly unchanged throughout the lifetime of an individual. Aldo and his team have deliberately chosen to focus on proteins — the building blocks of the body. Their highly differentiated approach is underpinned by a deep understanding of the clinical relevance of proteomics and the role glycosylation, one of the most important forms of post-translational modification, plays in cancer, inflammatory, and degenerative disease. With their first product, a laboratory test for ovarian cancer, the InterVenn team is showing the world that more sensitive detection of glycosylation changes and abnormalities can enable higher precision diagnosis.

For years, ovarian cancer has been called the “silent killer” because it’s a difficult cancer to detect, especially during the early stages. As a result, each year, thousands of women die because their ovarian cancer was misdiagnosed or detected too late. Given the close correlation between the stage of discovery and survival rates, we believe that early detection of ovarian cancer represents an inspiring opportunity for the InterVenn team to save lives. We’re energized by InterVenn’s commitment to this problem and the team’s mission-driven approach.

Please join us in welcoming the InterVenn team to the Amplify community!