ImpriMed, a California-based precision drugs startup, builds AI-powered canine most cancers remedy expertise that helps veterinarians determine essentially the most appropriate medicine for particular person canine and feline blood cancers.
The startup, which facilities on bettering remedy outcomes of canine and cats with most cancers first, now goals to broaden its precision drugs expertise for human oncology functions.
“The ex-vivo live-cell applied sciences we developed for canine blood cancers are well-applied to the vast majority of kinds of human blood most cancers in addition to feline blood cancers,” co-founder and chief government officer Sungwon Lim stated in an interview with TechCrunch. “Additionally, the confirmed know-how acquired from creating AI algorithms in veterinary oncology streamlines the constructing of latest predictive fashions in human oncology. The veterinary-to-human enlargement is going on now at ImpriMed and can lead to commercialization in one-two years.”
Lim, who beforehand labored within the most cancers drug business for greater than a decade, co-founded ImpriMed together with his outdated pal Jamin Koo in 2017. The duo had PhD levels from Stanford after receiving undergraduate levels in chemical and biomolecular engineering at KAIST in South Korea. Whereas working within the most cancers drug remedy business, he got here up with the identical query: “Are we effectively using all of the instruments we at the moment have in our medical toolbox?”
“People who find themselves affected by most cancers and desperately want remedy proper now don’t have time to attend over 10 years for a brand new drug,” Lim stated. “After all, it’s important to proceed trying to find new, higher therapeutic choices, however new drug growth shouldn’t be the one manner to enhance most cancers care.”
The co-founders need to make the most of current medicine to personalize most cancers remedy regimens for particular person sufferers. Lim says that ImpriMed’s AI-powered personalised drug efficacy prediction service permits oncologists to determine efficient anticancer medicines which can be extremely more likely to work for a particular affected person earlier than the physician comes to a decision.
ImpriMed not too long ago closed $23 million in its Collection A spherical, which brings its complete raised to $35 million since its inception. SoftBank Ventures Asia led the Collection A, with participation from strategic investor SK Telecom and different monetary buyers, together with HRZ Han River Companions, KDB Silicon Valley, Ignite Innovation Fund, Samyang Chemical Group and Murex Companions.
The outfit expects to accomplice with its strategic investor, SK Telecom, certainly one of South Korea’s greatest telco corporations, which builds an AI-based veterinary X-ray image diagnosis technology called X-Caliber. Final yr, ImpriMed graduated from the Mayo Clinic Platform Accelerate Program to “validate its AI fashions utilizing a giant human affected person database supplied by this system,” the corporate stated.
ImpriMed’s veterinary providers are totally commercialized, providing 5 canine and three feline providers and producing income. The startup says greater than 350 veterinarians within the U.S. have used its service. (There are approximately 600 board-certified veterinary oncologists throughout the U.S.)
That is how its B2B service works: First, the oncologist collects dwell most cancers cells and blood samples from the affected person and sends the samples to ImpriMed’s lab in California. The corporate then measures how the affected person’s dwell most cancers cells reply to completely different anticancer medicine, partly by utilizing AI to mix these measurements with different organic data and predict which medicine are most definitely to be efficient for the affected person’s most cancers. ImpriMed supplies the report back to the ordering veterinarian seven days after receiving the pattern on the lab, in keeping with the corporate.
For human precision oncology, its AI software program for multiple myeloma, a uncommon blood most cancers, is within the means of approval, aiming to commercialize in 2025, Lim informed TechCrunch. It additionally presents a live-cell-based drug sensitivity take a look at that lets prescription drugs measure the efficacy of latest drug compounds on precise sufferers’ dwell cells of their goal most cancers.
“We at the moment supply this contract analysis group service for canine lymphoma and intention to commercialize the service for human acute myeloid leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma earlier than the top of 2024,” the CEO stated.
Picture Credit: ImpriMed
Challenges ImpriMed is making an attempt to resolve
ImpriMed is tackling a major problem in veterinary drugs: treating lymphoma, the most common cancer diagnosed in dogs, extra successfully, Lim stated. As each canine is exclusive, typical remedy could be costly, starting from $10,000 to $25,000, and doesn’t work equally properly for all.
“Every most cancers affected person has a unique response to medicine, [even with standard chemotherapy protocol CHOP]; every lymphoma affected person responds otherwise,” Lim continued. “As a substitute of a one-size-fits-all strategy, its [AI-powered personalized] expertise not solely will increase the possibilities of profitable remedy however can probably scale back pointless prices and negative effects from much less efficient remedies.”
The corporate says it helped greater than 5,000 canine with lymphoma with its providers and picked up “real-world medical end result follow-up information from greater than half of these sufferers.” As well as, it ran additional validation with 2,000 people with blood cancers and Mayo Clinic Platform’s database of three million sufferers.
“Our recent study demonstrates that ImpriMed’s AI accurately identifies efficient lymphoma medicine for particular person canine with relapsed B-cell lymphoma, resulting in a 4-fold greater full response fee and a median survival time 3-fold longer than for many who obtained remedies that didn’t align with ImpriMed’s predictions, considerably bettering remedy outcomes,” the corporate CEO stated.
Opponents embrace pet precision drugs corporations like FidoCure and Vidium Animal Well being and firms that use dwell most cancers cells for purposeful precision drugs like Notable Labs and Xilis. ImpriMed’s distinctive power is “the flexibility to develop and incorporate AI fashions into the personalised drugs service workflow,” in keeping with Lim. Growing and incorporating AI fashions into the personalised drugs service workflow requires a considerable amount of medical end result information that different corporations wrestle with gathering, he added.
The corporate will use the most recent funding to broaden its drug response prediction expertise past veterinary drugs into human oncology, improve its workforce and broaden its pipelines in enterprise growth. It has about 40 employees.