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ArrePath has raised $20 million in seed financing to advance its proprietary, machine learning-based platform, the Princeton drug research company announced March 3. The platform is used to discover new classes of anti-infectives to fight antimicrobial resistance, the company said.

The Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund, Insight Partners and Innospark Ventures co-led the financing, which also included Viva BioInnovator, Arimed Capital, PTX Capital and Nor’easter Ventures.

“Antimicrobial resistance is an area with critical unmet medical need and is one of the Boehringer Ingelheim Venture Fund’s investment focuses globally,” Fei Shen, Boehringer Ingelheim managing director, said in a statement. “We are committed to playing a key role in the global ecosystem to solve the commercial challenges the area faces and supporting the next generation of anti-infective medicines.”

ArrePath also announced that Lloyd Payne as president and CEO of the company. Payne — who serves on the Novo REPAIR Impact Fund Scientific selection board and the AMR Action Fund Scientific advisory board — brings more than 25 years of scientific and business leadership in the discovery and development of anti-infectives.

Previously, Payne served as executive vice president, head of anti-infectives at Evotec. He also founded Euprotec, a life sciences company focused on anti-infective drug discovery and development and served as its CEO until its acquisition by Evotec.

“I am delighted to join ArrePath and work with such a talented team to address the central challenge of antimicrobial resistance and further develop the company’s innovative platform technology,” Payne said in the statement. “This financing is a strong vote of confidence, by a global investment syndicate, in our platform and its enormous potential in anti-infective drug discovery.”

ArrePath’s mission is to address drug-resistant infections, which result in at least 1.27 million deaths a year, according to a report published in January in The Lancet, the company stated in the announcement. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention estimates that, in the U.S. alone, drug-resistant infections result in at least 35,000 deaths annually, costing the U.S. health care system between $21 billion and $34 billion, ArrePath’s research found.

ArrePath, which is a spin-out of Princeton University, uses its advanced technology platform to discover new and differentiated antibiotics by decoding the complex behavior of bacteria when exposed to new chemical entities.

Zemer Gitai — ArrePath scientific founder and Edwin Grant Conklin Professor of Biology at Princeton University — and colleagues published proof-of-concept for the approach in the journal Cell in June 2020.