AI drug development startup Pathos AI closes $237M investment

AI drug development startup Pathos AI closes $237M investment

Pathos AI Inc. today announced that it has raised $237 million in funding at a $3 billion valuation.

Pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb Co. led the Series E round with participation from several unnamed returning backers. Pathos’ investor roster includes big names such as AstraZeneca plc, NEA and General Atlantic.

Pathos is developing cancer drugs using an artificial intelligence platform called Foundry. According to the company, the software has access to about 200 petabytes of oncological data. It also ingests the information generated by Pathos’ drug development programs. Foundry analyzes those datasets to help the company’s researchers pursue their work more efficiently.

Pharmaceutical research programs sometimes produce hundreds of drug candidates, molecules that can potentially be turned into medicines. Foundry uses AI agents to pinpoint the most promising molecules. From there, it identifies the patients who could benefit the most from each therapy.

Pathos also uses Foundry to plan clinical trials for the drugs that it develops. The company says that its trials are “biomarker-driven.” Biomarkers are biological phenomena that can provide insight into the effectiveness of a drug. They take a wide variety of forms ranging from proteins to patient metrics such as blood pressure.

“We are building a platform to systematically improve the probability of success in drug development,” said Pathos Chief Executive Officer Iker Huerga. “Foundry has fundamentally accelerated our ability to identify highly promising clinical assets and integrate them into our pipeline.”

Pathos will use its Series E round to finance its drug development efforts. The company stated that its “key priority” is its JSKN016 program, which aims to develop a cancer therapy based on a so-called antibody-drug conjugate.

Antibodies are molecules that identify disease-causing cells and bind to them. Once an antibody is attached to a cell, it functions as a kind beacon that draws the attention of the immune system. Immune cells subsequently find the antibody and destroy the cell to which it’s attached.

Antibody-drug conjugates use a variation of that approach to treat cancer. They’re effectively upgraded antibodies that contain an antigen, a molecule with therapeutic properties. Antibody-drug conjugates attach to cancer cells and cause them to absorb the antigen, which neutralizes them.

Pathos will also use the capital to finance three other drug programs. One of those initiatives is a collaboration with AstraZeneca, which invested in the company last year. The joint program seeks to develop a so-called ER PROTAC drug, which harnesses cells’ built-in material recycling mechanism to treat cancer.

The investment from Bristol Myers Squibb that Pathos announced today is part of a broader partnership between the companies. The collaboration also involves Tempus AI Inc., a publicly traded medical data provider .

Pathos will pay Tempus $55 million over five years to license anonymized data collected from patients with neurological conditions. The former company will analyze that information using Foundry to gain a better understanding of disease biology. Additionally, it will make both Foundry and the dataset available to Bristol Myers Squibb. The drugmaker will use them to improve its clinical trials and identify patients most likely to benefit from new drugs.

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