Partnership unites AI and single cell technology to map immune dysfunction and improve drug discovery and development outcomes
Parse Biosciences and Graph Therapeutics (Graph) today announced a strategic partnership to create one of the largest and most comprehensive immune cell perturbation atlases. The collaboration will leverage Graph's lab-in-the-loop platform with Parse's GigaLab to profile hundreds of millions of cells from patients with immune diseases under systematic perturbation, making the immune system's highly dynamic behavior accessible to AI-first drug discovery and development. This endeavor derisks and speeds up the development of new curative therapies for patients with immune-mediated diseases.
This press release features multimedia. View the full release here: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260120419953/en/
Autoimmune and immune-mediated diseases are driven by context- and patient-specific immune cell population responses, making it difficult for drug developers to identify drug targets and predict clinical outcomes. The partnership between Graph and Parse addresses this challenge by combining Graph's realistic patient-derived disease models and Parse's scalable whole transcriptome single cell technology to analyze hundreds of millions of human cells and reveal the diverse immune and tissue interactions that drive disease. This approach streamlines discovery and can prevent costly late-stage failures, with the potential to save millions for each drug that comes to market.
Graph's platform combines sophisticated primary patient cell assays with an iterative active learning technology to systematically select and test perturbations in a wide range of disease-relevant contexts. Rather than hoping simplified or static sampling models translate to clinical settings, Graph's scientists use an experimental framework that efficiently distinguishes promising from dead-end hypotheses before committing massive development resources. Each validation cycle informs the next, creating a compounding knowledge effect that accelerates future discoveries.
After Graph's platform intelligently selects which conditions to profile across the enormously complex space of immune dysfunction, Parse's GigaLab, which uses the Evercode technology, will generate massive single cell datasets with unprecedented speed and quality.
"After a decade of evolving impactful AI drug discovery platforms, we've learned that closing the gap between prediction and clinical reality demands active investment in biological context," says Gregory Vladimer, PhD, CEO and co-founder of Graph Therapeutics. "This partnership treats data as strategic infrastructure: every experiment is designed to reduce biological uncertainty, every validation compounds institutional knowledge, and every discovery accelerates the next. When you invest in fit-for-purpose, clinically relevant data generation at the discovery stage, you fundamentally change the economics and success rates of drug development."
"Graph's systematic testing of patient cells is the kind of transformative work the GigaLab was designed to support," said Charlie Roco, PhD, Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer at Parse. "This partnership shows how industrial-scale single cell biology and advanced AI can reveal disease mechanisms directly in patient cells and reshape drug discovery."
About Graph Therapeutics
Graph Therapeutics is developing a next-generation lab-in-the-loop AI platform to transform drug discovery in inflammation and immunology. Building on the team's previous success pioneering AI-enabled discovery in precision oncology at Allcyte and Exscientia, Graph combines sophisticated live patient cell approaches with advanced machine learning to overcome the unique challenges of developing therapies for complex inflammatory diseases. The company is headquartered just outside Vienna, Austria.
About Parse Biosciences
Parse Biosciences is a global life sciences company whose mission is to accelerate progress in human health and scientific research. Empowering researchers to perform single cell sequencing with unprecedented scale and ease, its pioneering approach has enabled groundbreaking discoveries in cancer treatment, tissue repair, stem cell therapy, kidney and liver disease, brain development, and the immune system.
View source version on businesswire.com: https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20260120419953/en/
Contacts:
Media Contacts
Graph Therapeutics
Anna Yuwen
pr@graphtx.com
Parse Biosciences
Kaitie Kramer
kkramer@parsebiosciences.com 858.504.0455
