Tiny Michigan biotech startup CircNova has raised a $3.3 million seed round for its technology that uses AI to target “circular RNA.” The development holds promise as a new method to quickly develop therapies for conditions that currently have no drug treatments.
The new funding is also a victory lap for co-founder and CEO Crystal Brown, who took an unconventional path to becoming a biotech founder.
RNA, or ribonucleic acid, is a key molecule that helps convert genetic information into proteins. Circular RNA is a relatively newly discovered class of such structures that form a circle rather than a strand. It regulates critical biological processes and the hope is that therapies based on these molecules will be able to target complex health issues.
CircNova has developed a “proprietary AI engine that allows us to identify, design, and then produce novel, non-coding, circular RNAs,” Brown told TechCrunch.
It’s an AI engine similar to Google’s AlphaFold in that it also uses deep learning AI – not some kind of LLM – to generate and analyze new circular RNA for therapeutic use.
CircNova not only has its NovaEngine, which it says is the first in the world to be able to predict circular RNA structures, but it also has a wet lab. That means its AI engine produces the actual physical molecules themselves, which can then be validated and researched in collaboration with the University of Michigan, Brown said.
“We can reverse engineer. We can go from sequence to structure. We can go from structure to sequence when developing the molecule,” she says.
The goal is to “treat diseases we haven’t treated so far, things like ovarian cancer, triple-negative breast cancer, neurodegenerative diseases, rare genetic diseases,” she describes.
The tech is based on the work of CircNova cofounder Jo …