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Exclusive: Clinical trial company bags $4.5M pre-seed

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Illustration: Sarah Grillo/Axios

BioPhy, a company that helps enhance the outcomes of clinical trials, raised $4.5 million in pre-seed funding, CEO Dave Latshaw II tells Axios exclusively.

Why it matters: Clinical trials have only a 7.9% success rate, limiting the chances of curing, preventing, or earlier diagnosis of serious and deadly diseases.

Details: The Philadelphia-based company saw this round of funding led by Metrodora Ventures, a firm led by Chelsea Clinton and Caroline Kassie.

  • Other participants in the round included Audere Capital and TRCM.
  • Prominent figures in life sciences include Jeff Marrazzo, co-founder and former CEO of Spark Therapeutics, which was recently acquired by Roche for nearly $5 billion.

How it works: The company has two products, BioPhyRx and BiologicAI.

  • The former is a generative AI solution designed to create a centralized area to access scientific and regulatory resources.
  • The latter is a predictive AI engine that aids life science companies through the drug development process and benchmarks preclinical assets against those in development or already approved by the FDA.
  • In live testing during the last 27 months, the validated technology predicted the outcomes of over 1,500 clinical trials with 80% accuracy, according to Latshaw.
  • The company is in pilot and has commercial agreements with several leading pharmaceutical companies.

What's next: "We will be fundraising our Series A in the next six months to a year," Latshaw says.

  • "We are working with two of the top 5 top pharmaceutical companies for pilots for our technology, and will continue to bolster relationships and leverage large opportunities."

What they're saying: "If there's anything we learned from the past few years ... it is that the need to bring drugs to market — quickly and effectively — has never been greater," says Metrodora's Kassie.

"In fact, research shows that just a 10% improvement in the success rates of clinical trials from AI is predicted to lead to an additional 250 novel therapies over the next 10 years."

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