Flagship Pioneering has launched Etiome, a new biotech company focused on using AI to detect and preempt disease before it progresses.

The company’s platform, called Temporal Biodynamics, is designed to track biological changes over time and identify early-stage interventions that could prevent or reverse disease.

Etiome emerges after four years of internal development and an initial investment of $50 million from Flagship. The company is developing what it describes as the first end-to-end platform to detect disease biostages, identify therapeutic targets, and develop stage-specific treatments it refers to as ‘biostaged medicines’.

Etiome is initially focused on progressive metabolic, neurodegenerative, autoimmune, and pre-cancerous diseases – areas with high unmet needs and the potential for early intervention. According to the company, its platform uses multimodal population-level data, single cell omics, and AI to track disease progression and identify biomarkers and therapeutic targets linked to specific disease stages.

Avak Kahvejian, founding CEO of Etiome and general partner at Flagship Pioneering, said the goal is to shift healthcare from a reactive to a proactive model by intervening earlier in the disease process.

The company’s leadership team includes several Flagship Pioneering executives, including co-founder and president Scott Lipnick; chief operating officer Yann Echelard; chief innovation officer Katharine von Herrmann; and chairman Torben Straight Nissen. Noubar Afeyan, founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering, is also a co-founder. The Etiome board includes Gregory Moore, former corporate vice president for health and life sciences at Microsoft and current senior advisor at Gates Ventures.

Raj Panjabi, head of Flagship’s preemptive health and medicine initiative and a board member at Etiome, said the platform aims to identify ‘critical intervention windows’ and develop medicines tailored to those points in disease progression.

Etiome plans to continue expanding its platform and build a pipeline of targeted therapies based on disease stage biology.