Revolution Team
October 31, 2024
3 min read
The oversubscribed $62M Series C will be used to expand the team, accelerate platform development, and advance its clinical-stage pipeline of precision oncology therapeutics.
Meet Pathos — the clinical-stage, AI-enabled biotech company that is re-engineering the drug development process to bring novel drugs to market.
What They’re Solving For: The standard drug discovery and development process is incredibly costly (~$1.1B), requires long development cycles (~10–15 years), and has a dishearteningly low success rate (>90% fail). The process is high risk for biopharmaceutical companies, and neither timely nor efficacious enough for patients in need. So Pathos is leveraging AI to transform every stage of drug development, from patient selection and biological indicator identification to clinical trial design and operations.
What They Do: Pathos uses AI to understand why some patients respond to certain treatments while others don’t, helping improve the chances of success in clinical trials and speed up drug development. By acquiring promising drugs and utilizing these insights for Phase II trials (the stage where 66% of drugs fail), Pathos hopes to revive promising drug candidates, reduce development risks, and bring targeted cancer treatments to patients more quickly.
How They Do It: The team’s proprietary platform, PathOS™, gains deep insights into patient responses using a causal AI framework that analyzes gene expression changes related to drug mechanisms and survival outcomes. Powered by a large, diverse real-world clinical, trial, and genetic dataset, the platform combines in-silico predictions (computer-based simulations that model how drugs may work) with ex-vivo drug screening (tests on real tissue outside the body) to confirm patient selection strategies before starting Phase II trials.
The Results To-Date: In the last 12 months, Pathos has acquired two clinical-stage precision oncology assets with plans to launch their Phase II clinical trials in 2025. For both therapeutics, the PathOS™ platform is fueling patient selection and clinical trial design to improve the likelihood of success.
Why We Like It: Pathos was co-founded by Eric Lefkofsky, the serial entrepreneur behind Tempus, and Ryan Fukushima, Tempus’s first employee. Beyond a trusted and proven founding team:
- Pathos management is made up of former founders, drug developers, and scientists with deep domain expertise at the intersection of AI and healthcare.
- Its platform leverages more than 200 petabytes of real-world oncology and genetic data to reveal critical biological insights often missed by traditional methods.
- Market trends show a large and growing pool of available assets, as well as a need for an efficient way to advance promising therapeutics from Phase I to Phase III. The company has also been thoughtful in acquiring drugs where they have differentiated insights and a data advantage.
Where They’re Headed: The Series C will allow Pathos to expand its team of world-class scientists and engineers, accelerate the development of its AI-powered platform, and advance its clinical-stage pipeline of precision oncology therapeutics. The company’s North Star is to accelerate the translation of real-world data into breakthrough therapies for patients who need them most. As the core platform continues to mature, the flywheel of knowledge discovery will only accelerate clinical development action.
We’re excited to add Pathos to our growing portfolio of companies transforming foundational industries through the practical application of AI. We look forward to partnering with Eric and Ryan once again as they scale a new drug development model that delivers on the promise of precision medicine.
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