Perlara
Perlara is a YC Winter 2016 (W16) company. Based in Oakland, CA, USA; Remote. Team of 1.
About Perlara
Summary
Perlara runs drug discovery and development for inherited metabolic diseases, a category that large pharmaceutical companies have systematically passed over. It uses yeast models of patient biology to screen repurposable and novel compounds, then advances candidates through clinical trials anchored to specific rare disease families. The work replaces the years of exploratory research that families would otherwise have to fund and coordinate themselves across disconnected academic and industry partners.
Go-to-market
Rare disease families and patient foundations initiate programs directly with Perlara, making them partners on a shared research and trial timeline rather than passive recipients of clinical-stage results.
From the Y Combinator listing
Perlara: building the YC for rare disease parents
Perlara 1.0 (Feb 2014 - Feb 2019) launched early R&D joint ventures called PerlQuests with highly motivated rare disease families, companies or impact investors. We screened gene-edited patient avatars for repurposable drugs in order to build a predictive R&D engine called ArkBase. We planned to monetize programs based on ArkBase predictions by selectively spinning out asset-centric clinical development NewCos. Perlara 1.5 (March 2019 - April 2020) was the transition to a one-person virtual clinical development company and when the epalrestat and aripiprazole repurposing trials were launched at Mayo Clinic for the treatment of PMM2-CDG and NGLY1-CDDG, respectively. Perlara 2.0 (May 2020 --> The first decentralized and distributed biotech
Facts
- Healthcare / Healthcare -> Drug Discovery and Delivery
- Oakland, CA, USA; Remote
- 1
- Active
- Early
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