Pathos AI, an AI drug development startup, closes a $237 million investment

Pathos AI Inc. today announced that it has raised $237 million in funding at a valuation of $3 billion.

Pharmaceutical giant Bristol Myers Squibb Co. led the Series E round, which included several unnamed returning backers. Pathos’ investor list includes big names such as AstraZeneca plc, NEA and General Atlantic.

Pathos develops cancer drugs using an artificial intelligence platform called Foundry. According to the company, the software has access to around 200 petabytes of oncology data. It also incorporates the information generated by Pathos’ drug development programs. Foundry analyzes these data sets to help the company’s researchers do their work more efficiently.

Pharmaceutical research programs sometimes produce hundreds of drug candidates, molecules that can potentially be turned into drugs. Foundry uses AI agents to identify the most promising molecules. From there, the patients who could benefit most from each therapy are identified.

Pathos also uses Foundry to plan clinical trials for the drugs it develops. The company says its studies are “biomarker-driven.” Biomarkers are biological phenomena that can provide information about the effectiveness of a drug. They can take a variety of forms, ranging from proteins to patient metrics like blood pressure.

“We are building a platform to systematically improve the probability of success in drug development,” said Iker Huerga, Chief Executive Officer of Pathos. “Foundry has fundamentally accelerated our ability to identify promising clinical assets and integrate them into our pipeline.”

Pathos will use its Series E round to fund its drug development efforts. The company said its “main priority” is its JSKN016 program, which aims to develop a cancer therapy based on a so-called antibody-drug conjugate.

Antibodies are molecules that identify and bind to pathogenic cells. Once an antibody is bound to a cell, it acts as a kind of lighthouse, attracting the attention of the immune system. Immune cells then find the antibody and destroy the cell to which it is bound.

Antibody-drug conjugates use a variant of this approach to treat cancer. These are effectively improved antibodies that contain an antigen, a molecule with therapeutic properties. Antibody-drug conjugates attach to cancer cells and cause them to absorb the antigen, thereby neutralizing them.

Pathos will also use the capital to fund three additional drug programs. One of these initiatives is a collaboration with AstraZeneca, which invested in the company last year. The joint program aims to develop a so-called ER-PROTAC drug that uses cells’ built-in material recycling mechanism to treat cancer.

Bristol Myers Squibb’s investment, the pathos announced is now part of a broader partnership between the companies. Tempus AI Inc., a listed medical data provider, is also involved in the collaboration.

Pathos will pay Tempus $55 million over five years to license anonymized data collected from patients with neurological diseases. The former company will use Foundry to analyze this information to gain a better understanding of disease biology. In addition, both Foundry and the Bristol Myers Squibb dataset are made available. The drugmaker will use them to improve its clinical trials and identify patients most likely to benefit from new drugs.

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