Rather than rigorously collecting data on cancer deaths to predict treatment outcomes, Cure51's founders had a different idea in mind. They decided to rotate the model 180 degrees. Instead, the company hopes to collect data on long-term cancer survivors and crack the code on the mechanisms that keep people alive. It has now raised €15 million in a seed round led by Paris-based Sofinnova Partners. Other investors in this round include Hitachi Ventures GmbH, Life Extension Ventures, Xavier Niel, and Olivier Pomel, his CEO and co-founder of Datadog.
The company will now use the funding to build “cohorts” of data to understand why certain cancer patients survive for long periods of time, even with highly aggressive disease.
Cure51 was founded in March 2022 by Nicolas Wolikow and Simon Istolainen. Both have previously worked at five prestigious oncology centers, including the Institut Gustave Roussy in Paris and the Vall d'Ebronin Hospital in Barcelona.
Mr. Wollikow told me: “There are many companies that license oncology databases, but their databases do not include survivors and do not present such multi-omic granularity (single cell and spatial). , lacks ethnic diversity.”
He also claims that companies like Flat Iron (Roche), Market Scan (IBM), and Iqvia offer “simple databases with clinical data and sparse genomic data.” However, drug discovery “requires a molecular database at the multi-omics level,” he says.
Simon Turner, partner at Sofinnova Partners, commented in a statement: “Focusing on ‘exceptional survival mechanisms’ is not a new concept, but Cure51 takes this to a whole new level in terms of the scale of the effort and also leverages the latest technology in the field of analytical technology. .”
The technology industry has increasingly turned its guns on its guns in recent years.
Alphabet recently announced a number of initiatives to bring AI models to the healthcare industry. One is tools to help Fitbit users gain insights from their devices, and a partnership to improve cancer and disease screening in India.