Sinopia lands $2.5M NIH grant to build metabolomics model for drug discovery
What's the deal? Sinopia BiosciencesDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → has won a $2.5 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II grant from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS)Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →, part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH)Dealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom →. The San Diego biotech will use the non-dilutive funding to build an AI-powered metabolomics "foundation model" for its LEADS drug-discovery platform.
What's the endgame? Metabolomics offers a direct read on cellular physiology and drug responses, but datasets from different labs and methods are hard to compare. Sinopia aims to train a model that learns shared biological patterns across diverse datasets, then uses them to interpret new experiments and surface drug targets.
What's next? Under the award, Sinopia will expand the model with proprietary and public data, broaden drug perturbation profiling, and test its ability to find novel targets and compounds in preclinical disease models.
The grant builds on earlier work profiling small molecules against more than 1,000 proteins. The platform has already produced lead candidate SB-0110, a PKA-II modulator in late-stage preclinical development for Parkinson's disease.
In their words: "The goal is not simply to combine more data, but to build a model that can learn shared biological patterns across diverse metabolomics datasets," said Bernard Bloem, principal investigator on the award.
Chief executive officer and co-founder Aarash Bordbar said the award "will strengthen a critical component of our LEADS platform," with the aim of translating discoveries into "a broader pipeline of first-in-class therapies."
The signal: Against a wave of far larger private AI drug-discovery rounds and pharma partnerships, $2.5 million is modest — the award sits around the 35th percentile by amount. But as targeted, non-dilutive money, it adds to Sinopia's platform-and-pipeline push alongside a March 2026 National Cancer InstituteDealroom has a profile for this one. Try Dealroom → grant and reported seed financing. Its real test is whether the work yields reproducible results, not just a model to describe.
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Image credit: Sinopia Biosciences
