Immunai is a biotech company that’s on a mission to fully map the immune system to better detect, diagnose, and treat disease by advancing personalised medicine through a comprehensive understanding of the immune system.
Raised €18.5 million!
Recently, the company has raised $20 million (approx €18.5 million) in seed funding, which will be used to further the development of its technology and business functions while expanding its team of scientists, engineers, and machine learning experts.
The funding round was led by Viola Ventures and TLV Partners, and have established clinical partnerships with over 10 medical centers, as well as multiple commercial partnerships with cell therapy and checkpoint blockade with biopharma companies.
Minor variation in cell therapy influences patient’s response significantly
Due to the incredible complexity of the immune system, trillions of its cells are partitioned into hundreds of cell types and states, and how they interplay with other cells and proteins is prohibitively hard to predict and also how drugs will affect immune cells. For cell therapies with high manufacturing costs, a slight variation in cell therapy products can have a significant influence on a patient’s response to the therapy.
Vertically-integrated platform!
The New York-headquartered company has developed a vertically-integrated platform for multi-omic single-cell profiling that offers a broader view of the immune system in states of health, disease, and treatment to examine the body’s response to a stimulus.
Identify more subtle nuances!
With Immunai’s platform, pharmaceutical companies can identify more subtle nuances in cell abundances and cell function and mechanisms of action and biomarkers for toxicity response to accurately measure the efficacy of immunotherapies.
For cell therapies, in particular, Immunai partners with cell therapy companies to understand cellular products’ sub-populations in unprecedented detail before and after infusion.
Noam Solomon, CEO of Immunai:
”When looking at only a specific disease or patient cohort, one gets a limited and siloed view of the immune system. “By using machine learning and applying it to our proprietary diverse database of single-sequencing data paired with rich clinical data, our platform identifies common patterns that are not visible when looking at the narrower disease-specific view.”
How it works:
- Immunai leverages single-cell technologies to profile cells at unprecedented scale and depth – deriving over a terabyte of data from a single blood sample.
- Its proprietary database and machine learning algorithms map incoming data to hundreds of cell types and states to create immune profiles based on highlighting differentiated elements.
- The database of immune profiles supports biomarker discovery and insight generation to help answer important questions about the immune system by identifying subtle changes in cell type and state-specific expression and helping distinguish that from normal expression.
Founded in 2018 by ex-Harvard-MIT postdoc Researcher, CEO Noam Solomon and ex-MIT and Palantir ML Engineer, CTO Luis Voloch, the company is headquartered in New York and has offices in San Francisco and Tel Aviv.
Voloch, said:
“Our mission is to map the immune system with neural networks and transfer learning techniques informed by deep immunology knowledge. We developed the tools and knowhow to help every immuno-oncology and cell therapy researcher excel at their job. This helps increase the speed in which drugs are developed and brought to market by elucidating their mechanisms of action and resistance.”
Main image credits: Immunai
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