Viswa Colluru's Enveda Biosciences maps plant chemistry to find drugs

In India, leaves, stems and roots of plants and their extracts are sold as cures for various ailments by practitioners of Ayurveda and homeopathy as well as quack doctors.

“It is common in India to use medicinal plants to treat symptoms,” Viswa Colluru, co-founder and chief executive of Denver, Colorado, based Enveda Biosciences, told Crunchbase.

Nature-based products are also sold in the U.S. and the West as cures and supplements, though few of them are approved by regulatory agencies.

Western pharmaceutical companies have derived numerous major medicines from plants, including aspirin, statins, and morphine. They are spending billions of dollars trying to find new nature-based drugs; but, extracting active compounds from plants is often slow and imprecise.

Unlike the major pharma companies, Enveda is taking a different approach by using recent advances in automation, machine learning, and metabolomics, which is the large-scale study of small molecules within cells.

Molecules from medicinal plants represent an enormous untapped library of unique drug-like chemicals that can be developed into small molecule drugs. Enveda is exploring this chemistry of nature, 95% of which is unknown.

The start-up is creating a high-resolution chemical map of the natural world “to unlock the vast untapped potential of natural products in the form of highly translatable medicines,” Colluru said in a statement.

Enveda’s platform operates like a search engine, predicting novel chemistry at scale. The chemistry is used to generate multiple high-confidence biological datasets in-house, leading to rapid identification of molecules with desired biological activity. These molecules undergo validation in Enveda’s lab, yielding drug candidates. At the same time, the information about the molecules is entered into Enveda’s platform, completing a data-feedback loop which reinforces the usefulness of the platform.

Enveda says it is on track to advance multiple lead molecules derived from plants, including candidates for treating Wilson’s disease and Parkinson.

The start-up was founded in 2019 by Viswa Colluru and Pieter Dorrestein. A professor at the University of California, San Diego, Dorrestein serves as the co-director of the university’s Institute of Metabolomics Medicine.

From 2016 to 2019, prior to founding Enveda, Colluru, 37 years old, worked at Recursion Pharmaceuticals, including on artificial intelligence driven drug discovery projects. Salt Lake City, Utah, based Recursion is a biotechnology company with a market value of $6.3 billion.

Earlier, from 2013 to 2016, Colluru worked as a tech transfer ambassador for the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, in Madison. Wisconsin. His tasks included performing infringement analysis on six biology patents to identify specific technological claims that were being violated by potential licensees and determine whether legal recourse was defensible.

Colluru holds a Ph.D. in cellular and molecular biology from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He earned a B.Tech. in bio-technology from Andhra University, India. In 2015, he took a 150-hour online course, Credential of Readiness, from the Harvard Business School.

Last week Enveda raised $51 million in funding, with venture capitalists eager to invest more funds than the company sought to raise. The key partners at the VC firms are also Indian Americans.

Lux Capital, based in Menlo Park, California, with Zavain Dar as the partner, led the investment round. Lux manages $4 billion in venture funds and was an investor in Recursion, Colluru’s former employer. Other investors include two San Francisco based funds: True Ventures, with Rohit Sharma as general partner, and Wireframe Ventures, co-founded by Harsh Patel.

Colluru plans to use the funds to advance Enveda’s existing portfolio of lead molecules and discoveries through pre-clinical development and hire more chemists, biologists and machine learning experts.

His goal is to fundamentally change where new medicines are found, and the speed and scale of finding them. Speaking of the new funding, Colluru said in a statement, “We see this investment as validation of a renaissance in natural product drug discovery.”

In a column for MedCityNews.com, Colluru notes  “Growing up in India, I learned to value and respect medicinal plants for their therapeutic properties. This is true of cultures around the world. What was missing was a repeatable system for identifying and isolating plant-based compounds at scale.”

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