Cambridge, Mass. — Flagship Pioneering, the venture creation firm behind biotech leaders like Moderna, announced the launch of Etiome, a new company focused on revolutionizing how diseases are detected and treated before symptoms emerge or progress becomes irreversible.
Built over four years of development, Etiome introduces a proprietary AI-powered platform called Temporal Biodynamics™, which provides an end-to-end approach to mapping and forecasting disease progression. With an initial $50 million investment from Flagship, the company aims to shift healthcare from reactive treatments to proactive, stage-specific interventions—a model it calls preemptive medicine.
“Etiome is changing the paradigm of disease management,” said Avak Kahvejian, Ph.D., Founding CEO of Etiome and General Partner at Flagship Pioneering. “By combining large-scale, multimodal data with single-cell omics and artificial intelligence, we can identify critical biological shifts over time. This allows us to develop Biostaged Medicines—treatments tailored to specific phases of disease—that have the potential to halt or even reverse progression.”
Traditional healthcare often intervenes too late, once diseases like Alzheimer’s, autoimmune disorders, or cancer have already caused lasting damage. Etiome’s Temporal Biodynamics™ platform targets the biological evolution of disease. It identifies Biostage Markers, which act as time-sensitive indicators of disease status, and leverages them to create precision therapies designed to act at optimal intervention windows.
Raj Panjabi, M.D., MPH, Head of Flagship’s Preemptive Health and Medicine Initiative and board director at Etiome, emphasized the urgency of the shift. “Until now, interventions have focused on late-stage care, which is often expensive, invasive, and ineffective. Etiome’s approach flips the script—empowering clinicians and patients to act early and decisively.”
Etiome’s initial therapeutic focus includes serious and progressive conditions such as metabolic, neurodegenerative, pre-cancerous, and autoimmune diseases—areas with high unmet clinical need and growing healthcare burdens.
“Our vision is a world where patients don’t wait for disease to get worse,” said Scott Lipnick, Ph.D., Co-Founder and President of Etiome. “Instead, we treat early, based on deep biological insights, and give people a real chance to live longer, healthier lives.”
Etiome’s founding team draws from deep expertise in systems biology, AI, and drug development. In addition to Kahvejian and Lipnick, the leadership includes Noubar Afeyan, Ph.D., Founder and CEO of Flagship Pioneering; Torben Straight Nissen, Ph.D., Chairman of the Board at Etiome; Yann Echelard, Ph.D., Chief Operating Officer; and Katharine von Herrmann, Ph.D., Chief Innovation Officer. Gregory J. Moore, M.D., Ph.D., a former Microsoft Health executive and current advisor at Gates Ventures, also serves on the board.
With its official debut, Etiome joins a growing movement toward preemptive health—aiming not just to treat illness, but to predict and prevent it entirely.
