SOMERVILLE, Mass., Feb. 12, 2024 /PRNewswire/ — Matterworks, Inc., developers of a foundational AI platform for modeling biology to accelerate discovery and development in the life sciences, today announces additions to its Board of Directors.
Matterworks is pleased to announce the appointments of Michael Lavin, a Managing Partner at Germin8 Ventures and Dr. Shubhra Jain, Head of Health-Tech Venture Investments at Tarsadia, as Board Members.
Germin8 Ventures specializes in transformative food and agriculture technologies and solutions. Michael Lavin, Managing Partner, brings experience from investment banking and consulting for clients ranging from early-stage startups to Fortune 500 companies. Lavin also previously served on an executive team, leading highly strategic internal corporate development advisory and M&A for Mesirow Financial, a global financial services firm managing more than $250 billion of assets.
According to Lavin, “though bioinformatics is a relatively young field of science, it is already ushering a revolutionary wave of omics tools, AI-enabled discovery engines yielding new medicines, precision therapies, diagnostic tools, new chemistries and new knowledge with limitless potential. While advanced lab instrumentation like liquid chromatography and mass spectrometry have produced the data to make all of this possible, the workflow still requires hands-on interpretation and has received little attention from software and AI, due to there being no semantic foundation in biology. Matterworks has built a breakthrough LLM consisting of unstructured biological spectra (data) and is predictive across a multitude of use cases, with astounding fluency, generating metabolite concentrations into actionable biological data. Matterworks’ ability to exploit unstructured biological data could usher in powerful new applications of untargeted omics modelling in many industries across life sciences, industrial chemicals, agriculture, and food. Germin8 sought to find innovators who shared our thesis at the intersection of biotech workflows and generative AI, and Matterworks was inspirational and executing on every level. We’re excited to partner with the Matterworks team, as well as our closely regarded venture colleagues, in building this transformational company that is on track to be biology’s AI backbone.”
Dr. Jain leads Tarsadia’s venture and growth equity investments in health-tech, a platform with over $2B in assets under management. In addition to her background as a primary care physician, she brings deep expertise in health-tech from her experience investing in companies such as Berkeley Lights, Zymergen and Mission Bio. Dr. Jain also previously led product development and launch at a health-tech startup as an operator. She has her M.S. in Engineering from Stanford School of Engineering and her MBA from The Wharton School.
According to Dr. Jain, “our scientific community’s efforts are just beginning to scratch the surface as we develop our understanding of the complexities of biology. Matterworks is uniquely positioned to leverage the latest advancements in AI to empower our scientific community and further our understanding of biology. At Tarsadia, we make high conviction investments in category defining companies. We are thrilled to be supporting the Matterworks team through this journey as they lay the foundations for interpreting biological data at an unprecedented scale and speed.”
“I am delighted to welcome Dr. Jain and Mr. Lavin at this exciting time in the Company’s trajectory. Their expertise will help drive us as we commercialize our first product and extend our foundation AI platform to new life science and biopharma applications,” says Dr. Jack Geremia, Matterworks CEO. The company recently launched Pyxis™, to solve the long-standing challenge of absolute quantitation in untargeted small-molecule analysis key to metabolomics, drug discovery and development. Pyxis is now in commercialization with select healthcare and life sciences companies.
About Matterworks
Matterworks is pioneering advances in AI that reveal insights otherwise hidden within the immense complexity of biological data. Our Large Spectral Model (LSM) platform is reinventing the analysis and interpretation of omic measurements, including advanced phenotype prediction and whole metabolome reading. To learn more, visit https://www.matterworks.ai.
SOURCE Matterworks
