A Chat with Christopher Trummer, Co-Founder and CEO at AI-First Drug Discovery Company: CelerisTx

CelerisTx is a tech-enabled early-stage drug discovery company that uses innovative, computer-based methods to develop degrader drugs for currently undruggable pathogenic proteins that are related to Parkinson’s, various types of cancers, and other diseases.

Jakob Hohenberger and I officially founded CelerisTx in January 2021. I have a biotechnology and information systems background, while Jakob is a serial entrepreneur in tech.

Together we combined our expertise and worked on the initial prototypes of the technology that is now a core part of the Celeris One platform. After we built these prototypes, our first investors were R42 from Silicon Valley and longevitytech.fund also from Silicon Valley, with Offices in Prague.

Celeris operates in the biopharma space and our company aims to cure incurable diseases through a novel therapeutic modality called Degraders.
 
 

 

What makes CelerisTx unique?

 
CelerisTx is the pioneer in AI-driven degrader development.

If you haven’t heard of targeted protein degradation here is a bit of background information.
Proteins are essential components of our bodies, and they will sometimes be responsible for whether or not we develop diseases. While conventional drugs work by blocking the functions of the protein, the novel technology of protein degradation promises not only to block pathogenic proteins but to degrade them completely. These degraders promise many benefits and have already begun to disrupt the entire market.

The advantages of the use of this technology include drugging of previously known to be undruggable or at least hard-to-drug proteins, overcoming drug resistance in cancer, and also lower exposure of the molecules themselves because they are more potent than conventional inhibitors. What sets CelerisTx apart is we are using AI-driven technologies to try to cure previously incurable diseases.

Our company was also the first to develop a holistic software platform, which is now being augmented with additional modules for chemical synthesis and biological validation.
 

How has CelerisTx evolved over the past few years?

 
Celeris has evolved over the past few years from just an idea to a new business and now has raised funds to progress even further, The company first raised a preseed round of 400k EUR. We then raised another 600k EUR, and through a seed round, raised almost 6m EUR in total about one year from the start. Celeris is now backed and supported by some of the top VC investment firms, including R42, APEX, longevitytech.fund, i&i biotech, and Pace Ventures Enigma.

Another part of our evolution has been building our lab. Our large lab is located in the city of Graz, Austria. CelerisTx’s lab has capacities for chemical synthesis and biological testing.
Technologically, we have grown from our beginnings too. CelerisTX has now published some papers plus validated methods. We have also seen growth from the proprietary drug development pipeline, as it is progressing well, and animal studies have also been performed.

Finally, we have evolved in our partnerships and collaborations. CelerisTx collaborates with Boehringer Ingelheim, one of the world’s leading research-driven pharmaceutical companies, and Merck KGaA, a leading science and technology company, which operates across healthcare, life science and electronics.
 

What can we expect from CelerisTx in the future?

 
There are many exciting things on the horizon! Currently, we are in the process of raising a Series A and we expect this to close soon. Our additional hope for the future is working with further big pharma partners to scale, grow and get our drugs on the market to improve people’s quality of life and even save lives.