Perlara: building the YC for rare disease parents
Perlara 1.0 (Feb 2014 - Feb 2019) launched early R&D joint ventures called PerlQuests with highly motivated rare disease families, companies or impact investors. We screened gene-edited patient avatars for repurposable drugs in order to build a predictive R&D engine called ArkBase. We planned to monetize programs based on ArkBase predictions by selectively spinning out asset-centric clinical development NewCos. Perlara 1.5 (March 2019 - April 2020) was the transition to a one-person virtual clinical development company and when the epalrestat and aripiprazole repurposing trials were launched at Mayo Clinic for the treatment of PMM2-CDG and NGLY1-CDDG, respectively. Perlara 2.0 (May 2020 --> The first decentralized and distributed biotech