Quite a few company announced funding rounds this week, despite layoffs, in particular I am pretty stoked to see Bioptimus finally come out of stealth, I’m pretty curious to see what they’ll come out with.

This Week in TechBio 2024/02/26

• 2024/02/23 Fierce Biotech: Abridge raises a \$150m series C, just 4 months after their \$30m series B. The company leverages generative AI to turn patient-doctor conversations into clinical notes, it also has been integrated into Epic, and has solid adoption in the medical community.
• 2024/02/21 STAT: Hospitals are rushing to integrate GenAI tools into their practice, while there are currently no clear evaluations of how well they work. These are mostly used for answering patients questions, scribing, or filing insurance claims. While it promises to save a lot of time for physicians, the current state is far from there. Indeed physicians have to evaluate all the output from these tools, as well as be sure to catch any errors. The main issue is that GenAI tools are made to generate plausible outputs, not correct outputs.

Early testing has revealed just how much policing the new tools require. At Cedars-Sinai, which is piloting Epic’s patient messaging tool with cardiologists and primary care providers, they’ve had to carefully design prompts to ensure that GPT-4 doesn’t overreach by offering medication renewals or hallucinate specialist referrals instead of answering patients’ direct questions. For now, as clinicians review and sometimes grade each message, the vetting process is taking more time from their day, not less, said Mike Thompson, the hospital’s vice president of enterprise data intelligence.

• 2024/02/20 Radiology Business: AZMed, a company building AI tools for X-ray images analysis, secures a \$15m series A.
• 2024/02/20 Bioptimus: Bioptimus, a spin-off from Owkin, just came out of stealth. It’s a company focused on building LLMs for biology, founded by former folks from Google DeepMind (actually most of them from my previous team). They announce a \$35m seed round led by Sofinnova.
• 2024/02/20 STAT: An interesting quick overview of the use of phage therapies for fighting bacteria. It quickly presents the company Armata, that is trying to push them through clinical trials, as well as the work of the TAILOR group at Baylor College,
• 2024/02/20 STAT: The current lack of clear guidelines for the use of AI by companies is starting to frighten tech startup wanting to tackle health issues. While their complains about overregulation may have some truth in them, it is also due to the fact that “move fast and break things” as well as “very quick iteration cycles” are just not the way folks should deal with healthcare. Because breaking things in healthcare means killing people instead of just serving unrelated adds. An argument could be made about the long term opportunity cost (i.e. kill a few patients now to save a lot in the future), but it would be a much tougher sell.
• 2024/02/20 STAT: Ring therapeutics, another Flagship company, also lays off 20% of its employees.
• 2024/02/19 STAT: The “All of Us” consortium published its first tranche of the data in Nature, containing EHR, questionaires, and genomic data. It contains about 245k genomics samples, and more than half is not of “white people”, thus allowing GWAS to work on different populations. This dataset will be of huge use to researchers and will suplement the UKBiobank samples, as well as allow researchers to build polygenic risk scores for non white populations.
• 2024/02/16 STAT: While the XBI is getting a bit better, layoff in biotechs and techbios keep on happening, even in well funded Flagship companies. Here Sonata Therapeutics is laying off 33% of its employees.
• 2024/02/16 STAT: The FDA has given accelerated approval to Amtagvi, the first TIL therapy for advanced melanoma. This therapy involves extracting cancer-fighting immune cells already present in the patient’s body. Despite its high toxicity and cost, Amtagvi has shown promise in a Phase 2 trial, with 31% of patients responding and 42% experiencing long-lasting responses. Unlike CAR-T therapy, which targets specific antigens, TIL therapy utilizes immune cells already fighting the cancer, making it harder for tumors to evade the immune system. The therapy is a bit risky as it involves destroying all other immune cells with chemo, injecting the patient-derived TIL, and injecting a lot of IL-2 to stimulate them.
• 2024/02/16 Endpoints News: Athos therapeutics, a company working on AI for small molecules in autoimmune diseases, raises a \$35m series B to fund their early clinical development as well as beef up their internal pipeline.
• 2024/02/16 STAT: Issues of national security are coming to biopharma, with a bipartisan effort to limit the spread of Chinese biotechs. This may be very dangerous because many compounds used in the supply chain of pharma come from China, if they chose to retaliate, the damages could be catastrophic. Furthermore there a a few collateral damages (e.g. WuXi Biologics who’s biofactories in the US are simply synthesizing biologics instead of developing new fancy IPs).
• 2024/02/15 Fierce Biotech: Roche lads in the \$254m funding round into Freenome, a company focused on designing cancer diagnostics tests.

I probably missed quite a few announcements, don’t hesitate to DM me @gama_search if you see anything missing or needing corrections.