NEW YORK – Notable, a Bay Area firm using automated laboratory testing, artificial intelligence, and single-cell omics for cancer drug discovery, said yesterday that it has raised $40 million in a Series B financing round to accelerate the development of its services.
The financing was co-led by B Capital Group and returning investor LifeForce Capital. Industry Ventures also participated in the round, which brings Notable's total funding to more than $55 million.
Notable said that its approach can help predict patient response to drugs in as little as five days. The company is aiming to provide its services to patients and physicians to better match patients to clinical trials for oncology drugs and increase the likelihood of success for drugs in those trials.
Besides using AI and automated laboratory workflows, Notable relies heavily on patient omic data, Notable Founder and CEO Matt De Silva said in an emailed statement.
"At Notable, we believe that it's necessary to observe what is happening at the single-cell level," De Silva said. "Our proprietary, automated platform provides unique functional readouts derived by exposing cancer cells directly to therapeutics. We then observe the interactions directly on live malignant and healthy cells."
De Silva further noted that company's observations integrate data from a variety of sources including flow cytometry and various sequencing modalities.
"We believe flow cytometry can provide direct evidence that a given drug, or combination of drugs, will impact tumor cells," De Silva said. "The addition of complementary technologies like sequencing offers context around the molecular mechanisms of the disease. Combining these data sources with cutting-edge, single-cell analysis provides a more complete picture of a patient's tumor and yields better insights into the design of productive treatment regimens."
The company said it has completed clinical studies in partnership with academic institutions such as Stanford University, MD Anderson Cancer Center, the University of California, San Francisco, Rady Children's Hospital, and Texas Children's Hospital.
Thus far, the firm and its partners have focused on myelodysplastic syndromes. "We are eager to scale the results we've generated with our academic collaborators by expanding our AI platform and automated laboratory to more cancer types," De Silva said.