Two former leaders of Recursion Pharmaceuticals have started their own biotech startup, hoping to bring a similar data-obsessed mentality to cancer research.
The San Francisco-based company called Noetik launched Thursday, announcing a $14 million seed round led by DCVC. Its two co-founders are CEO Ron Alfa, formerly head of research at Recursion, and CSO Jacob Rinaldi, who previously led oncology research at the Utah biotech.
The two started the company after seeing immunotherapies regularly produce exciting preclinical results, only to not translate in the clinic.
“Over those years, I started to notice a big gap in oncology drug development,” Alfa told Endpoints News. “We have a lot of great preclinical data, especially in I/O. But a lot of these molecules, when they were getting to the clinic, were not succeeding. There was this preclinical funnel that wasn’t being predictive of outcomes.”
While the majority of AI-focused biotechs are focused on…
Click here to view original post
