Virtual biology company secures $25m for virtual cell models

“Central and Eastern Europe has produced exceptional innovation, and Turbine stands out as one of the region’s most compelling virtual biology platforms. Our team assessed the opportunity from both a technology and life sciences perspective, and we believe the ambitious team’s unique capability to virtualize biological experiments with AI positions them to be among the global leaders embedding such technology into biopharma R&D,” said Laszlo Czirjak, Managing Partner at Interactive VP, a fund backed by the family office of Thomas Peterffy, Founder and Chairman of Interactive Brokers Group, Inc.

With the new funding, Turbine will expand its platform to virtualize new assays across discovery and translational medicine. Turbine’s lab-in-the-loop will generate additional proprietary perturbation datasets, allowing the company to fine-tune its foundational virtual cell model to novel assay and tissue types. These virtual assays are deployed through the company’s Virtual Lab, a no-code platform that integrates with pharma workflows and systems.

“At Beiersdorf Venture Capital we see clear potential in AI-driven technologies such as virtual cell models that help researchers assess how active ingredients interact with skin biology, skin conditions, and safety. Our investment in Turbine reflects our interest in deep‑tech approaches that could shape the future of skin research.” – Ascan Voswinckel (Head of Beiersdorf Venture Capital)

With the new momentum from the investment round, Turbine is expanding its oncology-focused offering in biopharma to include immunology through a newly announced collaboration with a top 10 pharma company. Per the agreement, Turbine’s virtual assays will be trained to model immune cell behavior using proprietary datasets provided by the partner. The companies aim to provide deep mechanistic insights into immune pathways to inform the identification and prioritization of novel therapeutic combinations. The collaboration will enable scientists to run virtual experiments at a massive scale and interpret in silico results in the Virtual Lab so that only high conviction hypotheses proceed to wet lab validation.

“Combination therapies have been proven to offer patient benefit. However, given the complexity of immunological diseases and the sheer number of potential combinations, virtualization is the only way scientists can rationally explore and identify the right drug combinations, as well as which patient cohorts may benefit from them.” said Szabolcs Nagy, Co-Founder & CEO at Turbine. “We are excited to expand into immunology, as a new therapeutic area, to build an active learning loop where simulations inform the right wet lab experiments, which in turn generate data that improves the next round of predictions to ultimately identify a number of potentially successful immunology drug combinations.”