Silicon-Valley-Biotech Phinomics Selects Bayer Co.Lab Berlin as European Launchpad

Phinomics, a Silicon Valley biotechnology company advancing AI-driven target and drug discovery, today announced it has selected Bayer Co.Lab Berlin as the base for its European expansion, the company's first international presence since emerging from stealth.

Admission to Bayer Co.Lab is highly competitive: rather than an open-access incubator, Bayer admits only a small, curated cohort of companies it identifies as having breakthrough scientific and commercial potential. Phinomics' selection places its platform alongside leading clinical, academic, and pharmaceutical partners in one of Europe's fastest-growing life-science ecosystems, as the company builds pharma collaborations to advance AI-enabled oncology drug discovery.

Phinomics has built a proprietary Deep Biology multi-omics platform centered on extrachromosomal circular DNA, which it calls the Circulome. These genetic elements, which sit outside the standard chromosomal genome, are increasingly recognized as important drivers of tumor evolution, oncogenesis, and drug resistance, and are implicated in at least half of all cancers. While their roles in cancer progression and phenotypic evolution have been documented for decades, their use in the clinic has been blocked by a multifactorial technical wall (spanning isolation chemistry, sequencing signal-to-noise, and the absence of computational tools to resolve them), until now. Using its patented direct-isolation methods, Phinomics captures the Circulome at 100? higher sensitivity and resolution than existing sequencing approaches, and integrates it with genomic, transcriptomic, epigenetic, and proteomic data from paired tumor and matched normal tissue from the same patient.

By incorporating this "hidden layer" of cancer biology into a unified multi-omic knowledge graph and combining it with explainable AI, Phinomics aims to reveal disease mechanisms and therapeutic targets that are missed by conventional approaches built on fragmented or single-modality data.

The clinical relevance of this hidden layer is increasingly supported by emerging research. Foundational work co-authored by Phinomics' founders, including the first version of its genome- wide method for isolating and mapping circular DNA (2017) [1] and a clinical framework for eccDNA's role in tumor heterogeneity and resistance (2020) [2], together with a rapidly growing body of independent research, has established circular DNA as a central and clinically consequential feature of cancer. Phinomics was founded to make this layer visible from the outset of drug discovery, rather than after resistance has already emerged.

Bayer Co.Lab Berlin is located on Bayer Pharmaceuticals' global headquarters campus, placing Phinomics in close proximity to Charit? - Universitaetsmedizin Berlin, the Berlin Institute of Health (BIH) at Charit?, and the Max Delbrueck Center (MDC). This embeds the company within one of Europe's most concentrated networks of clinicians, researchers, and industry partners. The incubator is set to expand into Riverside Labs, the nucleus of an emerging health innovation quarter in Berlin, where it will be co-located with the Berlin Center for Gene and Cell Therapies - a joint Charit?, Bayer and BIH facility opening in 2028.

"The next frontier in AI-driven drug discovery is data diversity and completeness. Today's models can only learn from the biology we are able to measure, and scale alone does not solve that: a trillion measurements of one narrow layer still leave a model blind to the rest of the system. For decades, a critical layer of cancer biology has stayed invisible, because conventional sequencing workflows miss extrachromosomal DNA. Phinomics begins there, capturing the Circulome, and then completes the picture, integrating this hidden layer with orthogonal molecular data from the same biological moment to reveal the deep mechanistic and regulatory pathways that drive disease," said Massa Shoura, PhD, Founder and CEO of Phinomics. "To advance our platform, we need more than laboratory space; we need an environment where advanced AI, translational science, and clinical research come together. Bayer Co.Lab Berlin sits at that intersection. Being selected into Berlin's life-science ecosystem enables us to work closely with clinicians, researchers, and industry partners to translate newly observable biology into the next generation of oncology therapeutics."

"Great science - and the companies behind it - shouldn't have to cross an ocean alone," said Ruth Shah, Head of Bayer Co.Lab Berlin." Phinomics is opening up a layer of biology that conventional genomics misses, and it is doing so with the kind of precision that can make it work. Bayer Co.Lab exists to be a landing pad for companies like this: providing a base from which they can establish a European presence."

Bayer Co.Lab Berlin is part of Bayer's pioneering global network of life-science incubators focused on disruptive innovation and scientific breakthroughs. Bayer Co.Lab empowers visionary start-ups and entrepreneurs by providing company-tailored access to the Bayer ecosystem and expert mentorship across research, development and commercialization as well as a vibrant global community, immersed in state-of-the-art laboratory and office infrastructure, where they can transform groundbreaking ideas into impactful healthcare solutions.

As foundation models reshape drug discovery, the bottleneck is increasingly shifting from model scale to the quality and completeness of the biological data used to train and validate them. Phinomics' expansion into Europe reflects growing investment in next-generation biological datasets designed to complement advances in artificial intelligence and accelerate translational research.

The expansion also reflects a broader trend of deepening collaboration between U.S. technology-driven biotechs and European clinical ecosystems. From its Berlin base, Phinomics aims to co-develop programs with academic institutions, healthcare organizations, and pharmaceutical partners, translating discoveries from computational models into clinical validation. The company is actively pursuing partnerships across oncology and, over time, additional disease areas.


Phinomics, Inc.
Brittan Ave
94070 San Carlos
United States
https://www.phinomics.com

Massa Shoura, CEO
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About Phinomics

Phinomics is a Silicon Valley biotechnology company decoding the hidden biology of cancer to power the next generation of precision therapeutics.

A Stanford spinout founded on more than five decades of combined expertise in circular-DNA biology, with roots in the Nobel Prize-winning laboratory of Andrew Fire, Phinomics has built the only platform that captures extrachromosomal circular DNA (the Circulome) at 100? higher sensitivity and resolution than existing methods.

The Circulome is the starting point: Phinomics integrates it with genomic, transcriptomic, epigenomic, and proteomic data from matched tumor and normal patient tissue, uniting these orthogonal layers into a single, well-controlled intelligence system. This is the diverse, complete data that AI in biology requires, and it feeds an explainable-AI engine that maps the pathways, mechanisms, and causal relationships governing living cells, surfacing novel therapeutic targets, resistance mechanisms, and patient-stratification biomarkers invisible to conventional platforms.

Phinomics exists to complete our understanding of human biology so that medicine is built on the full picture, enabling Phinomics to reveal the vulnerabilities that stay hidden from everyone else and design a safer, more effective generation of therapies. Phinomics' mission is to move medicine from invisible biology to tomorrow's therapeutics at scale.

For more information, visit www.phinomics.com.