Sinopia Biosciences Secures $2.5 Million NIH Grant to Advance Metabolomics Foundation Model for Drug Discovery

NIGMS SBIR Phase II award will support development of an AI-powered metabolomics foundation model designed to unify insights across metabolomics data and accelerate therapeutic discovery through Sinopia's LEADS® platform

SAN DIEGO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sinopia Biosciences, Inc., a biotechnology company leveraging multi-omics data, high-throughput screening, and artificial intelligence to identify and develop first-in-class therapies for diseases with significant unmet need, today announced it has been awarded a $2.5 million Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) Phase II grant (R44GM154585) from the National Institute of General Medical Sciences (NIGMS), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). The award will support the development and validation of an AI-powered metabolomics foundation model designed to integrate data generated across different experimental platforms and analytical methods, enabling Sinopia to leverage diverse datasets for drug discovery through its proprietary LEADS® (LEarn And DiScover) platform.

"Sinopia was founded on the belief that integrating rich multi-omics data and AI can reveal therapeutic opportunities that conventional drug discovery approaches may miss," said Aarash Bordbar, Ph.D., Chief Executive Officer and co-founder of Sinopia Biosciences. "This Phase II award will strengthen a critical component of our LEADS platform, enabling us to leverage a much broader range of metabolomics data to uncover novel disease biology and therapeutic opportunities. Our goal is to translate these discoveries into a broader pipeline of first-in-class therapies across diseases where patients need better options.”

Metabolomics provides a direct view of cellular physiology and drug-induced biological changes, offering valuable insights into disease mechanisms and therapeutic responses. However, differences in experimental platforms, analytical methods, and data processing have historically made it challenging to compare and integrate metabolomics datasets generated across laboratories and studies, limiting their collective value for drug discovery.

"We are developing a metabolomics foundation model designed to address this challenge by facilitating comparison and integration of data from different sources," said Bernard Bloem, Ph.D., Principal Investigator of the award. "The goal is not simply to combine more data, but to build a model that can learn shared biological patterns across diverse metabolomics datasets and use that knowledge to interpret new experiments, identify common mechanisms, and uncover new opportunities for drug discovery."

The Phase II award builds on Sinopia’s prior work developing a metabolomics foundation model, as well as large scale metabolomics profiling efforts spanning small molecules targeting more than 1,000 proteins across multiple cellular contexts. Under the new award, Sinopia will expand the foundation model using diverse proprietary and public datasets, expand drug perturbation profiling, and evaluate its ability to identify novel therapeutic targets and compounds in preclinical disease models.

The foundation model is a key component of Sinopia's proprietary LEADS platform, which integrates multi-omics data, high-throughput screening, and AI/machine learning to uncover novel disease biology and identify differentiated therapeutic opportunities. By enabling comparisons across diverse metabolomics datasets, the model is expected to expand the biological information accessible to LEADS and strengthen its ability to identify therapeutic mechanisms and targets that may be difficult to uncover through conventional discovery approaches. The platform has already produced Sinopia's lead candidate, SB-0110, a novel PKA-II modulator now in late-stage preclinical development for Parkinson's disease.

Research reported in this publication was supported by the National Institute Of General Medical Sciences of the National Institutes of Health under Award Number R44GM154585. The content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the National Institutes of Health.

About Sinopia Biosciences

Sinopia Biosciences is a biotechnology company leveraging multi-omics data, high-throughput screening, and artificial intelligence to discover and develop first-in-class therapies for diseases with significant unmet need. The company's proprietary LEADS® (LEarn And DiScover) platform uncovers novel disease biology and targets to identify differentiated therapeutic opportunities. Sinopia's pipeline is led by SB-0110, a novel PKA-II modulator in preclinical development for Parkinson's disease, with additional discovery programs spanning multiple disease areas. Sinopia is headquartered at JLABS San Diego.

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