Atlas Bio has emerged from stealth with $13.2 million in combined funding from Creandum, First Momentum Ventures, and LEA Ventures to develop an AI platform designed to predict how patients will respond to drugs before clinical trials begin.
The company is building a foundation AI model that runs clinical trials in silico, with the technology already being used to model full Phase II trials.
Atlas Bio’s goal is to help biopharmaceutical companies better understand how different patient populations may respond to treatments and indications before committing significant resources to clinical development.
The platform predicts and compares patient responses across therapies and indications, giving drug developers additional information when deciding which programs to advance, acquire, or potentially expand into new indications.
Atlas Bio was co-founded by Simon Romanski and Sebastian Boehmer.
Romanski said the company emerged from the founders’ belief that clinical trials should not be the first point at which drug developers discover whether a treatment is likely to work for a particular patient population.
That challenge is especially important because drug candidates can fail in clinical studies even when the underlying therapy may have therapeutic value, but was evaluated in the wrong disease, indication, or patient group.
Atlas Bio aims to address that problem by using its foundation model to generate predictive insights earlier in the development process.
The company said its models have already generated findings that were subsequently observed in clinical settings.
In immunology, Atlas Bio said insights generated by its technology are already being used to support clinical decisions by partners and customers.
The platform could ultimately help biopharma companies identify promising drug opportunities earlier, improve indication selection, and reduce the likelihood of advancing programs into expensive clinical trials without sufficient understanding of how specific patients may respond.
The financing will support Atlas Bio as it develops its technology and expands adoption among pharmaceutical and biotechnology companies.
The company is also backed by investors including Katharina Wilhelm, Nils Seele, and Sebastian Boehmer.
KEY QUOTES:
“Living with Type 1 Diabetes, I have benefited throughout my life from good and rapidly improving treatments. Unfortunately that is not the default: many drug candidates fail in the clinic even though the drug would work – just not in the disease it was tested in. A treatment that could help patients may never reach them. Sebastian B. and I think that the trial shouldn’t be where you find out if a drug is working on a patient. We founded Atlas Bio to help understand far more about how patients will respond to a drug before a clinical trial begins.”
Simon Romanski, Co-Founder And CEO Of Atlas Bio
