Biocortex

BioCorteX is a London-based techbio (digital medicine) company that models the interactions between pharmaceuticals, the human microbiome and the host in order to predict who responds to a given treatment and why. Its premise is that every pharmaceutical interacts with the bacteria living in and on the body, that these bacterial populations differ from one geography or population to another, and that this variation explains why an asset can succeed in one region and fail in another.

The company's core offering is the "in-silico bridge trial": a computational study run before clinical work that maps drug-microbiome interactions so that scientific, regulatory and commercial teams can move a drug asset from one population to another. BioCorteX positions the work as mechanism-first and fully auditable, contrasting it with AI approaches that predict whether an asset works rather than for whom and why. Earlier company materials describe a flagship product, Carbon Mirror, a first-principles in-silico simulation combining physics, chemistry and computational techniques to assess and predict an individual's treatment response from their microbiome profile; current site material describes a platform named NeoCorteX as the toolkit behind each bridge trial. Applications cited include clinical trial design, treatment decision-making and novel therapeutic development, with intended beneficiaries including patients, pharmaceutical companies and payers.

Founding story

BioCorteX was founded in 2021 by Dr. Nik (Nikhil) Sharma, Chief Executive Officer, a clinician, and Dr. Mo (Muhannad) Alomari, Chief Technology Officer. The founders framed the company around the observation that drug development largely ignores drug-bacteria interactions, contributing to failed trials and apparently random variation in patient response, and assembled a team of clinicians, engineers and microbiome scientists to build in-silico simulations analogous to those used in designing nuclear reactors and jet engines.

Business model

BioCorteX sells computational drug-development services and platform access to pharmaceutical asset owners, inviting companies to "bring us your asset" for in-silico bridge trials that inform clinical trial design and population-to-population translation of a drug candidate.

Traction

Raised a $5 million seed round in March 2023 led by Sofinnova Partners and Hoxton Ventures, with Hoxton having first invested in 2022; investor partners Edward Kliphuis (Sofinnova Partners) and Hussein Kanji (Hoxton Ventures) joined the board of directors.

Latest developments

BioCorteX currently markets in-silico bridge trials built on its NeoCorteX platform, aimed at helping drug developers move assets between populations, and references working partnerships on its website.