Parallel Bio’s $21M in Series A will drive aim to trim $2B and 9 years from drug development timelines

Cambridge-based biotechnology company Parallel Bio has closed a $21 million Series A funding round led by AIX Ventures. The company develops a drug testing platform that uses human organoid technology as an alternative to animal testing.

The funding round included new investors Amplo and Salesforce CEO Marc Benioff, along with existing backers Metaplanet, Humba Ventures, Atypical Ventures, Undeterred Capital, and Jeff Dean. The company has raised nearly $30 million to date.

“In our seed stage, we proved our core technology works and were able to sign on eight pharmaceutical partners to use our Clinical Trial in a Dish to test more than 50 drugs,” said  Robert DiFazio, co-founder and CEO. “In this next phase, we are rapidly scaling our organoid platform so we can work with orders of magnitude more partners over time across a much larger number of drug pipelines.”

“Technology investors like AIX Ventures and Marc Benioff understand that our goal is to build a company that is the antithesis of a traditional biotech company,” DiFazio said. “Our singular mission is to develop foundational models of human biology and our vision to replace animal and human testing with these models,” he added. That mission is “what has attracted this core group of investors, as they understand that this is what the future will look like.”

DiFazio notes that the latest funding will enable the company to scale, building a team of approximately 30 scientists and engineers while investing in more AI and automation to “run exponentially more studies at one time across a greater diversity of patient profiles.”

“One important milestone will be working with one of our current partners to take the first drug co-developed on our platform to the FDA for clinical trial, something we expect in the next 12-18 months,” he said.

Parallel Bio’s platform uses lymph node organoids, 3D tissue models that replicate human organ structure and function, combined with artificial intelligence and robotics to test pharmaceutical compounds.

The technology addresses a persistent challenge in drug development: the vast majority of drugs that succeed in animal trials fail when tested in humans. By using human-derived models from the outset, the company aims to improve prediction of drug safety and efficacy before clinical trials begin.

“The reliance on lab mice to model human biology has limitations,” said Robert DiFazio, the company’s CEO and co-founder. “We’re using organoids and AI to test drugs in human models from the start.”

In a recent collaboration, biotechnology company Centivax used Parallel Bio’s platform to test its universal flu vaccine candidate, Centi-Flu. The organoid study showed the vaccine produced immune responses against multiple flu strains, including strains not included in the vaccine formulation. The study also demonstrated activation of T cells, which play a role in fighting infections.

Centivax plans to begin human clinical trials of Centi-Flu next year, with the organoid data serving as preliminary validation of the vaccine’s mechanism of action in human tissue models.

Parallel Bio is also making inroads in Big Pharma and beyond. “We’re working with a combination of large pharma companies, including three in the Fortune 500, and startups and mid-sized companies,” said Juliana Hilliard, co-founder and chief scientific officer. “The drugs being studied on our platforms include everything from vaccines to checkpoint inhibitors and other immunotherapies, largely in the preclinical phase. The partners are studying safety and efficacy of drug candidates.”

When asked about the FDA’s April announcement that it plans to phase out the animal testing requirement for monoclonal antibodies and other drugs, Hilliard said, “More than anything, it will help accelerate the shift from animal testing to human-based methods.” At present, pharma companies are “largely complementing their traditional animal studies with new methods like our Clinical Trial in a Dish, gathering a combination of animal and human-first data,” she added. “But as we continue to collaborate with some of the world’s largest pharmaceutical companies, our shared goal with these companies is to fully replace animal studies and eventually reduce the size and scope of human studies.”

According to Hilliard, the industry will “eventually move to a world where human-first data takes precedence.” She continued: “The openness of the FDA to new methods like organoids removes a major hurdle. The next major step will be a pharma company submitting an application based entirely on non-animal data, and now the FDA is more open than ever to that happening.”

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