附近上门

Life sciences data startup has raised $6 million in seed funding to continue developing its artificial intelligence-powered immune monitoring platform.

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Seattle-based Ozette鈥檚 technology was spun out of a collaboration between the and the in 2020 by company co-founders , , and Evan Greene.

The company says its platform enables scientists to quickly extract reliable insights from single-cell data across instruments, experiments and disease states. That data can be used by doctors to diagnose and prescribe medication with greater accuracy.

鈥淭his was a good time for us to seek funding due to the breakthroughs we have made with respect to the system,鈥� CEO Ansary told 附近上门 News. 鈥淭raditionally, this area has been a 鈥榖lack box,鈥� and now we found we can treat cancer with the immune system. We have pioneered this work over the last decade, and where there are huge clinical applications, we are learning from the data that is being generated.鈥�

led the seed round, with participation from the Allen Institute for Artificial Intelligence and . Including this round and other grant funding, the company has raised about $12 million in total, Ansary said.

Ozette will use the seed funding on technology and platform development, as well as to hire talent including data scientists, engineers, computational biologists and immunologists, he added.

鈥淲hat Ozette is delivering to science and medicine is game-changing because it sheds light on the entire cell profile of the immune system, not just only a small percentage of it,鈥� , managing director at Madrona, said in a written statement.

While the co-founders have been working on this technology for a decade, the company鈥檚 platform received a boost when Evan Greene came on board, Finak, chief technology officer, said in an interview.

Greene was able to make advancements that enabled the team to see single cells in high resolution, including being able to measure cells and proteins in the cells 鈥� more cell types than they could previously identify.

鈥淲e started seeing data through a new lens,鈥� Finak said. 鈥淚nstrumentation has grown in recent years, but information was being left on the table. We can now measure 30 to 40 proteins on one cell and across thousands of data sets. When the search space is trillions of cells, our technology enables us to see these, why some therapies work and on who.鈥�

Meanwhile, immune monitoring is typically used to discover new treatments for cancer, but can be applied to a number of disease areas, including autoimmune and infectious diseases. In 2019, the global cancer immunotherapy market was predicted to reach $243 billion by 2026, according to .

Companies focused on data, AI and disease breakthroughs have also recently attracted investor interest, including:

• , which brought in $60 million in Series A funding last week, led the, the Duquesne Family Office, and.
• raised $19 million in an oversubscribed Series A funding round, led by , to integrate a wet lab with machine-learning technologies to guide the search for better antibodies.

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