Pathos

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 PlatformWe 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 PathosPathos 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. ContactsBusiness Development: bd@pathos.comPress Inquiries: press@pathos.com

Chicago startup Pathos AI has completed a $62 million Series C to keep looking for Phase 1 cancer drugs that it can acquire and test in more specific patient populations, it said Tuesday morning. The round, at a $600 million post-money valuation, brings the three-year-old biotech’s total funding to $102 million. Pathos is derived from executives of Tempus , the AI healthcare company partnered with many big drugmakers. While many AI-driven biotech startups are using the technology to create new drugs, Pathos said it is using AI to scour for experimental treatments already in the clinic that it can test in new trials with patients who are more likely to respond. The goal is to “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,” CEO Ryan Fukushima said in a release. He’s also operating chief of Tempus. Since its founding, Pathos has already acquired three clinical-stage drugs: Prelude Therapeutics ‘ PRMT5 inhibitor; a takeover of Rain Oncology ; and a licensing deal for Novo Nordisk’s CBP/p300 inhibitor . It also bought a machine learning startup called Known Medicine in 2023. Pathos said it will launch new clinical trials next year for medicines it has bought. New Enterprise Associates led the Series C. Other investors include Revolution Growth, Builders VC and Lightbank, a VC firm co-founded by Tempus CEO Eric Lefkofsky.

CHICAGO, Aug. 15, 2024 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Pathos AI, Inc. (www.pathos.com), a biotechnology company focused on revolutionizing precision medicine in cancer by harnessing the power of machine learning to transform drug development, announced today the world-wide license of PRT811, a potent, selective, and orally bioavailable brain penetrant SAM-competitive PRMT5 inhibitor from Prelude Therapeutics. PRT811 (renamed P-500) was developed by Prelude Therapeutics and completed a Phase 1 trial in March 2023. The trial enrolled patients with solid tumors including high-grade glioma and uveal melanoma and has potential application in other indications with high unmet need. Out of 16 patients with high-grade glioma with isocitrate dehydrogenase mutations (IDH+) in the Phase 1 trial, two confirmed complete responses (CR) were observed. At last follow-up, 1 response is ongoing and has lasted 31.0 months while the duration of response for the second CR patient was 7.5 months. Additionally, 1 patient achieved an unconfirmed partial response (PR). In addition, out of 23 uveal melanoma patients (10 patients with splicing factor 3B subunit 1 (SF3B1) splicing mutations and 13 without an SF3B1 mutation), one confirmed PR (duration of response of 10 months) and a second unconfirmed PR were observed, both in patients SF3B1 mutations. In the entire safety population (N=86), the most common adverse events of any grade, with an incidence of >20% were nausea (60.5%), vomiting (46.5%) fatigue (36.0%), constipation (29.1%), and thrombocytopenia (24.4%), and were predominantly grade 1-2. The most common adverse events (grade ≥3), occurring >5% were thrombocytopenia (9.3%), anemia (9.3%), and fatigue (5.8%). “These results from Prelude’s Phase 1 study are promising news for high-grade glioma patients and clinicians, who still have limited treatment options with chemotherapy and radiation that hasn’t changed in decades. With our AI Platform, we aim to increase the already encouraging response rate of P-500 through a novel biomarker-driven strategy, ultimately bringing this medicine to patients as efficiently as possible,” said Ryan Fukushima, Pathos CEO. “Prelude’s discovery engine has delivered a number of first- or best-in-class precision medicines including PRT811, a molecule that has shown early promise in the treatment of high-grade glioma. We are confident that Pathos AI, sharing our passion for precision medicine and commitment to serving cancer patients with high unmet need, is an ideal company to drive the development of this molecule forward for patients.” said Sean Brusky, Prelude CBO. "The resources from this transaction will support advancing Prelude's pipeline." About P-500P-500 (previously PRT811) is a selective, brain-penetrant small molecule inhibitor of protein arginine methyltransferase 5 (PRMT5) that has the potential to provide clinical benefit for patients with advanced solid tumors, including high-grade glioma and uveal melanoma. PRMT5 is an enzyme that adds methyl groups to proteins in cells using a molecule called S-adenosylmethionine (SAM) which regulates protein function and interactions. Several processes that support cancer cell growth and spread depend on PRMT5, making P-500 relevant not only to advanced high-grade glioma and uveal melanoma (in which objective responses to P-500 were observed in the Phase 1 clinical trial) but also to a number of other cancer indications. Preclinical studies have demonstrated PRMT5 inhibition can sensitize cancer cells to other treatments, expanding the application of P-500 to combination therapy in additional indications. About PathosPathos is a clinical-stage biotechnology company focused on re-engineering drug development, leveraging the power of AI technologies to bring precision medicines to market through partnership with biopharmaceutical companies. Pathos has raised $40 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. ContactsBusiness Development: bd@pathos.comPress Inquiries: press@pathos.com