Canine cancer treatment ImpriMed aims to extend AI technology to human oncology

Imprimeda California-based precision medicine startup, is building AI-powered canine cancer treatment technology that helps veterinarians identify the most appropriate drugs for individual canine and feline blood cancers.

The startup, which is focused on improving treatment outcomes for dogs and cats with cancer first, now aims to expand its precision medicine technology for human oncology applications.

“The ex-vivo live cell technologies we developed for canine blood cancers apply well to most types of human blood cancers as well as feline blood cancers,” co-founder and CEO Sungwon Lim told TechCrunch. “Also, the proven expertise gained from the development of AI algorithms in veterinary oncology is modernizing the creation of new predictive models in human oncology. Vet-to-human expansion is happening now at ImpriMed and will result in commercialization in a year or two.”

Lim, who previously worked in the cancer drug industry for more than a decade, founded ImpriMed with his old friend Jamin Koo in 2017. The duo had PhDs from Stanford after undergraduate studies in chemical and biomolecular engineering at KAIST in South Korea. While working in the cancer drug treatment industry, he pondered the same question: “Are we effectively using all the tools we currently have in our medical toolbox?”

“People who have cancer and are in desperate need of treatment right now don’t have time to wait over 10 years for a new drug,” Lim said. “Of course, it’s important to keep looking for new, better treatment options, but developing new drugs shouldn’t be the only way to improve cancer care.”

The co-founders want to use existing drugs to personalize cancer treatment regimens for individual patients. Lim says that ImpriMed’s AI-powered personalized drug effectiveness prediction service allows oncologists to identify effective cancer drugs that are most likely to work for a particular patient before the doctor decides.

ImpriMed recently closed a $23 million Series A round, bringing its total to $35 million since inception. SoftBank Ventures Asia led the Series A, with participation from strategic investor SK Telecom and other financial investors including HRZ Han River Partners, KDB Silicon Valley, Ignite Innovation Fund, Samyang Chemical Group and Murex Partners.

The company expects to work with its strategic investor, SK Telecom, one of South Korea’s largest telecommunications companies, which makes an AI-based veterinary x-ray imaging technology called X-Caliber. Last year, ImpriMed graduated from the Mayo Clinic Platform’s Accelerate program; to “validate its AI models using a large database of human patients provided by the program,” the company said.

ImpriMed’s veterinary services are fully commercialized, offering five canine services and three feline services and generating revenue. The startup says more than 350 vets in the US have used its service. (There are approximately 600 board-certified veterinary oncologists across the US)

Here’s how the B2B service works: First, the oncologist collects live cancer cells and blood samples from the patient and sends the samples to ImpriMed’s laboratory in California. The company then measures how the patient’s living cancer cells respond to different cancer drugs, in part using AI to combine those measurements with other biological information and predict which drugs are most likely to be effective for the patient. patient’s cancer. According to the company, ImpriMed provides the report to the ordering veterinarian seven days after the laboratory receives the sample.

For precision human oncology, AI software for Multiple myeloma, a rare blood cancer, is in the approval process, with a goal of commercialization in 2025, Lim told TechCrunch. It also offers a live cell-based drug sensitivity test that allows pharmaceutical companies to measure the effectiveness of new drug compounds in live cells of real patients with their target cancer.

“We currently offer this research organization service for canine lymphoma and aim to commercialize the service for human acute myeloid leukemia and non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma before the end of 2024,” said the CEO.

Challenges ImpriMed is trying to solve

ImpriMed is addressing a major challenge in veterinary medicine: the treatment of lymphoma, the most common cancer diagnosed in dogs, more efficiently, Lim said. As each dog is unique, conventional treatment can be expensive, ranging from $10,000 to $25,000, and does not work equally well for everyone.

“Each cancer patient has a different response to drugs, [even with standard chemotherapy protocol CHOP]; every lymphoma patient responds differently,” Lim continued. “Rather than a one-size-fits-all approach, it is [AI-powered personalized] The technology not only increases the chances of successful treatment, but can potentially reduce unnecessary costs and side effects from less effective treatments.”

The company says it has helped more than 5,000 dogs with lymphoma with its services and collected “real-world clinical outcome tracking data from more than half of the patients.” In addition, further validation was run with 2,000 people with blood cancers and the Mayo Clinic Platform database of 3 million patients.

“Us a recent study proves that ImpriMed’s AI correctly identifies effective lymphoma drugs for individual dogs with relapsed B-cell lymphoma, leading to a 4x higher complete response rate and a 3x longer median survival time than those receiving treatments that did not align with ImpriMed predictions; significantly improving treatment outcomes,” said the company’s CEO.

Competitors include precision medicine companies for pets such as FidoCure and Vidium Animal Health and companies that use live cancer cells for functional precision medicine such as Notable Labs and Xilis. ImpriMed’s unique strength is “the ability to develop and integrate AI models into the workflow of personalized medicine services,” according to Lim. Developing and integrating AI models into the workflow of personalized medicine services requires a large amount of clinical outcomes data that other companies struggle to collect, he added.

The company will use the latest funding to expand its drug response prediction technology beyond veterinary medicine into human oncology, grow its workforce and expand its business development pipeline. It has about 40 staff.