Berg Health Focuses AI on Prostrate Cancer and Parkinsons

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The high growth AI-drug discovery market has attracted several players. However, the high cost of drug development, and the slow regulatory process associated with drug release has also led to several consolidations. One such story is that of Berg Health.

Berg Health’s Offerings

Farmington, MA-based Berg Health was founded by real estate investor Carl Berg and Dr. Niven R. Narain. Dr. Narain is a double major in biochemistry and philosophy. In 2000, when he was a senior in college, the first iteration of the fully sequenced human genome was revealed to the world. He attended a lecture by James Watson, American molecular biologist who co-discovered the DNA double-helix. The discovery helped accelerate cures and knowledge of healthcare and disease. The lecture piqued Narain’s interest in the thought that the human genome could serve as a historical blueprint and help outline how the healthcare industry could better understand a patients’ past and potential outcomes for the future. Merging these interests with his passion for computers and research, he embarked on leveraging AI for drug discovery.

It was around the same time that real estate investor Carl Berg got tired of investing in real estate and was looking at diversifying his portfolio by investing in tech startups. He met Narain to consult on a skin care line whose early tests had shown some anticancer properties. Although the benefits were too low to be effective in patients, Berg connected with Narain and discussed Narain’s proposal to find other potential treatments with supercomputers to analyze tissue and patient data.

By 2009, Berg Health was launched with the intention of developing an AI-based platform that would focus on cancer drug discovery. Along the way, Berg was also planning on commercializing the platform. Within five years of setting up, Berg Health had entered into a tie-up with the Department of Defense. They collected hundreds of thousands of tissue samples to analyze the trillions of protein and gene combinations to find common markers for prostrate cancer. Berg Health wanted to create a blood test that could help accurately detect who’ll develop the cancer. Berg Health also tied up with researcher J. William Langston who gave them access to use his 25 years of tissues and samples to find a cure for Parkinson’s.

Berg Health’s home-grown Interrogative Biology platform gathers data from the company’s biobank of over 100,000 samples, and then uses proprietary AI software and the Frontier supercomputer at Oak Ridge National Laboratory to generate insights to be applied in clinical trials. By 2023, Berg Health had a portfolio of over 400 U.S. and international granted and pending patents as it worked to use the platform to develop its pipeline of drug candidates.

Berg Health’s Financials

Berg Health remained privately held till 2023. It did not divulge its investor listing, but it had raised $400 million in funding from its investors. In February 2023, Berg was acquired by BPGbio (BPG), an investor group led by Daniel Elliott, managing partner of private equity group Phoenix Genesis. BPG retained all of Berg’s employees, including the management team. Berg Health’s CEO Narain became BPG’s CEO. Terms of the acquisition were not disclosed. BPG plans to fund commercial acceleration of the prostate cancer diagnostic, as well as several diagnostic candidates that are currently under clinical validation in pancreatic cancer, Parkinson’s, and breast cancer. Within two months of acquisition, BPG had entered into a new five-year partnership with the Department of Defense and was also working on a plan to go public.

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Photo Credit: Chaiyan Anuwatmongkolchai from Pixabay