New Proprietary Target Discovery and Validation Platform Integrates Multiomics, Contingent AI, Phenoclustering, and CRISPR Screens to Accelerate Drug Discovery
Renovaro Inc. an AI-driven precision medicine company that leverages AI/ML platforms to improve outcomes for cancer and neurologically challenged patients, today announced it has launched Augusta, a Precision Neurology Platform for patient stratification, biomarker discovery, drug discovery, and validation. Augusta is focused on neurology where diagnosis and treatment have historically lagged. Built on the company’s Renovaro Cube and Elion platforms and recently validated through work in Parkinson’s Disease and epilepsy, the platform combines multimodal data analytics with proprietary in silico screening to identify biomarkers and therapeutics in a fraction of the time of conventional methods.
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Neurological disorders remain among the most difficult to diagnose and treat due to heterogeneity in symptoms, unclear disease boundaries, and limited biomarkers. Augusta addresses these challenges through:
- Data Preprocessing: Augusta is the first biomedical-specific machine learning (ML) platform to perform fast, effective data pre-processing. It uses a patented process to enable optimization of all decision points in data processing, reducing bias and improving results for drug discovery/development, diagnostics, and precision medicine.
- Phenoclustering: Advanced clustering of patient-level phenotypic and clinical data to define biologically and clinically meaningful subgroups.
- Biomarker identification: Fusion of multimodal data pipelines with predictive analytics to derive precise, actionable biomarkers. Biomarkers include clinical features, as well as molecular features identified using proprietary transformer models designed to detect mutations and epigenetic alterations.
- In silico screening: Proprietary models built on generative frameworks that predict the effect of disrupting thousands of genes in silico, reducing the number of experiments and animals used.
- Closed loop validation: Initial validation in CRISPR modified zebrafish empowered by proprietary computer vision models provides fast confirmation of gene and small molecule effects on brain development and behaviour, while simultaneously providing readouts on unwanted toxicities in specific genetic backgrounds.
Unlike black-box approaches, the Augusta platform emphasizes interpretability, clinical alignment, and rigorous benchmarking. Augusta’s modular infrastructure enables plug-and-play model evaluation, including for large language models (LLMs) conditioned using proprietary knowledge graphs. This supports continuous innovation while maintaining clinical and experimental robustness.
“The Augusta platform is about validation,” said David Weinstein, Renovaro CEO. “We’re setting a new bar for how AI can be responsibly and effectively deployed in clinical and experimental settings.”
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The efficacy of this approach has already been demonstrated in Parkinson’s Disease, where phenoclustering identified novel and highly predictable patient subgroups with unique clinical characteristics and biomarkers, and in epilepsy, where novel lead compounds were identified specifically addressing patient populations with rare genetic mutations.
With a strong foundation in Parkinson’s disease and epilepsy, Renovaro plans to expand its precision neurology efforts into additional neurological disorders. Strategic partnerships with academic medical centres and life sciences companies are currently being discussed.
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