WILMINGTON, Del. and COPENHAGEN, Denmark, April 9, 2026 /PRNewswire/ -- DeepCyte, a techbio company building AI toxicology tools for drug development, launched today with $1.5 million in seed funding. The company is introducing two solutions to help biopharma teams detect, predict and explain drug toxicity - in human cells, at single-cell resolution.
Drug toxicity remains a leading cause of clinical trial failure and drug withdrawal, costing the industry billions annually. Conventional methods - animal models, high-throughput screening and bulk assays - often fail to predict human responses and cannot resolve the heterogeneous cellular effects that drive adverse outcomes. Regulators including the FDA and EMA are accelerating the shift toward human-relevant, evidence-based, mechanism-aware testing, creating demand for new predictive technologies.
"DeepCyte's mission is to reveal and prevent toxicity in every cell, at scale, before drugs reach patients," said Theodore Alexandrov, Ph.D., CEO and co-founder. "By combining advances in AI and single-cell biology, we predict not only whether a drug is toxic, but also why."
MetaCore is DeepCyte's high-throughput single-cell metabolomics platform built on award-winning laser-based sampling and mass spectrometry technology. MetaCore delivers molecular profiles providing insights on what is happening inside cells and captures the heterogeneous responses that bulk assays obscure. Critically, it generates atlas-scale AI-ready datasets with minimal sample preparation and at enabling cost.
DeeImmuno is DeepCyte's first AI solution using MetaCore data and purpose-built ML to exploit single-cell biology, trained on proprietary single-cell metabolomics atlases. DeeImmuno predicts toxicity class, identifies biomarkers, and infers molecular mechanisms of toxicity. Evaluated on 100 held-out drugs, DeeImmuno predicted 17 detailed toxicity mechanisms with 94% accuracy - a breakthrough result for such mechanistic resolution unachievable with conventional methods.
DeepCyte's leadership combines expertise in pharmacology, AI, and life sciences commercialization. CEO Theodore Alexandrov previously developed METASPACE, a cloud software used by thousands of researchers globally, and co-founded SCiLS GmbH, later acquired by Bruker. The seed round was supported by Carl J. G. Evertsz, a medtech executive, former CEO and investor who will serve as Board Chair.
About DeepCyte
DeepCyte is headquartered in Delaware and Copenhagen, with the mission to transform toxicology. DeepCyte combines MetaCore, a category-defining high-throughput single-cell metabolomics platform, with DeeImmuno, an AI toxicology solution enabling biopharma teams to predict toxicity earlier, infer mechanisms, and move beyond animal models and bulk assays toward human-centric drug safety testing.
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