Perlara is a public benefit corporation and drug discovery platform based in South San Francisco, CA, led by founder and CEO Ethan Perlstein, PhD. It conducts discovery journeys called PerlQuests with families and patient organizations to develop treatments for rare diseases. The company's first PerlQuests target Niemann‑Pick C Disease (NPC), Niemann‑Pick A Disease (NPA), NGLY1 deficiency, and PMM2‑CDG; learnings from the NPC PerlQuest may inform Alzheimer’s candidates. Its initial PerlQuest partners are Grace Science Foundation, Wylder Nation Foundation, and Maggie’s PMM2‑CDG Cure. Perlara intends to use the new funds to advance programs, discover novel lead compounds for its first three PerlQuest partners, and double its disease pipeline by launching six new PerlQuests. Since its 2014 founding the company has raised $9.9M in total. Perlstein Lab (PLab) builds an automated drug-discovery platform that uses CRISPR-edited small animals (yeast, worms, flies, fish and sometimes mice) to model single-gene rare diseases and screen thousands of chemical compounds. The platform tests live organisms rather than cell cultures, which the company cites as a key differentiator versus many Big Pharma approaches. PLab focuses initially on single-gene rare diseases (about half of rare diseases) because they are simpler to model and quicker to screen at scale. The company plans to add a predictive learning model to the platform to accelerate insight generation and improve efficiency over time. Go-to-market strategies include serving as a lead-generation or accelerator partner to larger pharmaceutical companies and a second model that works directly with patient families to spin ultra-rare disease programs into separate startups, with PLab taking a cut. Financially, the articles report prior raises and a recent convertible note: PLab had raised $2.5M from several investors and has also raised a $1M convertible note (see funding details).

Total raised

$8M

Funding rounds

2

Latest round

Equity

Latest activity

Nov 2017