Elephas Biosciences announced today that it has raised $55 million in Series C funding. Venture Investors Health Fund and State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB) led the round. Existing investors that joined the round include Northpond Ventures, ARCH Ventures, Sands Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures, Tao Invest, and WARF Ventures. This $55 million Series C funding round brings the total raised by Elephas to $116.5 million.
Elephas is developing an oncology imaging diagnostics platform for predicting response to immunotherapy using the latest advances in metabolic imaging. And the platform utilizes live patient biopsies with intact native tumor architecture and treats them with potential therapies to predict response to treatment.
The basis of the platform is to visualize immune cell activity including T cell activation and cytotoxic mediated killing. And Elephas is conducting observational clinical trials to demonstrate that a patient’s clinical response to immunotherapy is correlated to the response data obtained by the Elephas platform, adding confidence the data generated from the platform can be used to predict response.
The company also launched their biopharma services offering in 2023, partnering with biopharma companies to accelerate immunotherapy drug development using the Elephas platform.
Oncology drugs are considered the largest pharmaceutical therapeutic area, with immunotherapies emerging in the last decade as powerful tools in the fight against cancer. But despite the significant increase in the number of available immunotherapies, only 1 in 3 patients receiving immunotherapy frontline receive a response and many who may respond are not eligible for therapy due to a lack of accurate predictive biomarkers.
XMS Capital Partners acted as financial advisor to the company.
KEY QUOTES:
“We remain intensely focused on our mission to improve care for cancer patients. Supported by world class venture firms we are committed to building a platform that can help guide clinicians and enhance access to life-changing immunotherapies.”
– Maneesh Arora, founder and CEO of Elephas
“The Elephas platform holds immense promise to address a critical unmet need in predicting response to immunotherapy. We are excited to work side by side with the company to pioneer a new diagnostic era for immunotherapy that will improve both access to therapy and outcomes for patients.”
– Venture Investors Health Fund’s Paul Weiss
