- Profile
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General
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Founders & Team
Jonah Sinick, Yuriy Kirichok, Michael Grabe, Liliya Gabelev, David Segura
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Year Founded
2020
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Company type
Private company
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Funding stage
Pre-seed
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Total funding ($M)
0.1
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Investors
Y Combinator
Technical Details
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Aging Target
Mitochondrial dysfunction
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Disease indication
obesity
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Product modality
small molecule drugs
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Clinical stage
Pre-clinical
About
We are developing a drug to increase metabolism and burn calories without exercise.
Obesity and type 2 diabetes have reached epidemic proportions. There are 2.2B overweight people and 500M people with type 2 diabetes worldwide, and these numbers increase drastically every year. Existing drugs are not effective enough to reverse the trend. Our drug can solve this problem, because it addresses the root cause of metabolic disorders – the imbalance between caloric intake and expenditure.
Our drug will target mitochondria – the powerhouse of the cell – to generate heat. This approach has been proven to fully reverse obesity and type 2 diabetes in animals. However, therapeutic application for humans was impossible, because mitochondrial heat production could only be induced by highly artificial methods with side effects. This changed after our recent breakthrough discovery of the protein that mitochondria naturally use to generate heat. We have developed a unique high-throughput drug discovery platform to identify compounds that selectively activate this target protein, without side effects.
For decades people have wanted a drug that burns calories like exercise does. We are realizing this dream at Equator Therapeutics.