Arunima is a life sciences company working on drug discovery for mental illnesses. We are building quietly, with people who believe the next generation of psychiatric medicines should be designed, not stumbled upon.
Most psychiatric drugs in use today descend from discoveries made decades ago, often by accident. Patients deserve better than that.
Depression, anxiety, schizophrenia and bipolar disorder affect hundreds of millions of people, yet treatment still means trial and error: months of waiting to learn whether a medicine works, side effects that drive people to stop, and whole groups of patients for whom nothing works at all.
Arunima exists to change how these medicines are found. We bring modern computational biology, better models of the brain, and a patient-first view of what a successful treatment actually looks like to a field that has gone too long without new ideas.
Three commitments shape everything we work on.
We start from the mechanisms of illness in the brain, not from compounds looking for a disease. Better targets make better medicines.
Machine learning and modern modeling narrow the search, predict what will fail early, and let small teams move with the reach of large ones.
A medicine counts as working when a person's life gets better, not only when a score moves on a scale. We design for that from day one.
Our work is aimed at the mental illnesses where the gap between what patients need and what medicine can offer is widest.
people worldwide live with a mental disorder.World Health Organization, World Mental Health Report, 2022
Scientists, clinicians, investors and partners who want to work on this problem: we would like to hear from you.