CHICAGO, Oct. 29, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pathos AI, a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on re-engineering drug development through artificial intelligence, today announced the closing of an oversubscribed $62M Series C funding round. The Series C financing round was led by New Enterprise Associates (NEA) with participation from Revolution Growth and other existing insiders. This new capital infusion will enable Pathos to expand its team of world-class scientists and engineers, accelerate the development of its AI-powered drug development platform, and advance its clinical-stage pipeline of precision oncology therapeutics. This latest round, which also included its existing investors, Lightbank and Builders VC, was completed at a $600 million post money valuation, bringing the three-year-old company's total funding to $102M.
In the last 12 months, Pathos has acquired two clinical-stage precision oncology assets with plans to launch the next clinical trials in 2025. For both therapeutics, P-300 and P-500, the PATHOSTM platform is fueling its patient selection strategy and clinical trial design to improve the likelihood of success. For example, Pathos was able to prioritize certain biological mechanisms that are relevant for P-500, a phase-II ready, brain-penetrant PRMT5 inhibitor, and those same mechanisms were driving different patient outcomes for a subgroup of IDH+ high-grade glioma patients in the real-world. This insight can help identify the patients most likely to benefit from P-500 and explain mechanistically why certain patients responded to P-500 while others did not respond in the Phase I clinical trial. Pathos plans to translate this insight into an enhanced patient selection strategy and launch the next clinical trial to demonstrate an improved efficacy signal.
"There are hundreds of investigational drugs with phase I results demonstrating a tolerable safety profile and modest efficacy, yet too many of these drugs go on to fail in future phases in clinical trials. By leveraging AI to understand why some patients respond and others do not, we believe we can materially increase the probability of successful trials, accelerate development through the clinic, and help resurrect failed or shelved compounds for the patients they were meant to serve,” said Ryan Fukushima, Interim CEO of Pathos. "We are excited to work alongside a great group of investors that share our passion to radically improve drug development. This funding will allow us to scale our operations and translate our insights to improve the lives of patients at an accelerated pace.”
"We believe Pathos' mission to revolutionize drug discovery and development by combining best-in-class AI capabilities with large libraries of clinical patient data resonates with NEA's storied history of investing at the intersection of technology and life science,” said Mohamad Makhzoumi, Co-CEO, NEA. "We are thrilled to lead Pathos' Series C financing and to bring our expertise to this strategic partnership as Ryan and the pathos team work to pioneer the future of precision medicine.”
With an initial focus on phase II oncology clinical trials, Pathos is applying its AI platform to acquire additional clinical stage opportunities with phase I results, demonstrating a safe and tolerable profile. Pathos is systematically identifying causal links of critical biological mechanisms that drive certain cancers and lead to worse patient outcomes in the real-world. With this information, Pathos prioritizes critical biological mechanisms and acquires great drugs with the relevant mechanisms of action to attack cancers in particular patient sub-populations. By pairing the right patient selection strategies with great oncology therapeutics, Pathos believes it can partner with biopharma to usher in the next era of precision medicine and improve the current success rates in clinical trials at the same time.
About PathOSTM Platform
We have built a proprietary platform and operating model called PathOS™ to gain crucial insights and act on them at scale. We do this using a causal AI framework analyzing changes in expression levels across all genes which are both associated with overall survival and known to be regulated by the mechanism of a given drug. Our AI models are fueled by one of the largest multimodal real-world datasets with patient outcomes, DNA sequencing and RNA sequencing data. By combining our in silico insights with ex-vivo drug screening approaches, we orthogonally verify whether our patient selection strategies are predictive of future patient benefit prior to designing our phase II clinical trials.
About Pathos
Pathos is an AI-enabled biotechnology company focused on re-engineering drug development, leveraging the power of technology to bring precision medicine to patients through partnerships with pharmaceutical companies. Pathos has raised over $100 million to accelerate the development of precision medicines and to expand its platform, combining computational approaches across multimodal real-world data and patient-derived biological models. Additional information can be found at www.pathos.com.
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