Instead of gathering hard data about cancer deaths to predict treatment outcomes, the founders of Cure51 had another idea. They decided to turn the model around 180 degrees. Instead, the company is collecting data on long-term cancer survivors, hoping to crack the code of what keeps people alive. It has now raised a €15 million Seed round led by Paris-based Sofinnova Partners. Other investors in this round were: Hitachi Ventures GmbH, Life Extension Ventures, Xavier Niel and Olivier Pomel, CEO and co-founder of Datadog.
The startup will now use the money to create a “cohort” of data to find out why some cancer patients survive for a long time, even with extremely aggressive forms of the disease.
Cure51 was founded in March 2022 by Nicolas Wolikow and Simon Istolainen. Both had previously worked at five well-known oncology centers, including the Institut Gustave Roussy in Paris and the Vall d’Hebronin Barcelona.
Wolikow told me, “There are many companies that license oncology databases, but their databases do not include survivors and do not show such multi-level analysis (single-cell and spatial) and lack national diversity.”
It also claims that companies such as Flat Iron (Roche), Market Scan (IBM), Iqvia offer “simple databases of clinical data and sparse genomic data”. But molecular databases “at multi-omic levels are required for drug discovery,” he said.
In a statement Simon Turner, Partner at Sofinnova Partners commented: “Looking at ‘excellent survival mechanisms’ is not a new idea, but Cure51 has taken it to a whole new level in terms of the scale of the effort, as well as the exploitation of the latest in analytical techniques’.
The tech industry has increasingly turned its guns on cancer in recent years.
Alphabet recently announced a series of initiatives to develop artificial intelligence models in the healthcare industry. One will be a tool to help Fitbit users get information from their devices and a partnership to improve cancer and disease screenings in India.
