Israel’s Immunai first to map whole immune system, scores $20m. investment
Immunai says it has mapped out millions of immune cells and their functions that could help detect, diagnose and treat cancer and many other diseases.
By MAAYAN JAFFE-HOFFMANImmunai co-founders (from left) Luis Voloch and Noam Solomon(photo credit: Courtesy)
A company founded by two Israeli masterminds announced on Thursday that it has built the largest proprietary data set in the world for clinical immunological data.Leveraging single-cell technologies and machine learning algorithms, Immunai says it has mapped out millions of immune cells and their functions, which could help detect, diagnose and treat cancer and many other diseases.“When looking at only a specific disease or patient cohort, one gets a limited and siloed view of the immune system,” said Immunai founder and CEO Noam Solomon. “By using machine learning and applying it to our proprietary diverse database of single-sequencing data paired with rich clinical data, our platform identifies common patterns that are not visible when looking at the narrower disease-specific view.”On Thursday, the company also announced a $20 million seed funding investment in the company by Viola Ventures and TLV Partners.Solomon holds two doctorates, from Tel Aviv University and Ben-Gurion University, and did post-doctoral work at Harvard and MIT. His co-founder, CTO Luis Voloch, also studied at MIT, where he received the Best Thesis award in computer science among doctorate students. They work together with co-founder Ansuman Satpathy, a professor of cancer immunology at Stanford University, and a diverse team of employees with doctorates and medical degrees from top-tier universities in the United States and around the world. Solomon told The Jerusalem Post that the staff comes from more than 10 countries; 45% of team members are women.The company is headquartered in New York, with R&D in Tel Aviv.Cell therapies and cancer immunotherapies have revolutionized medicine in the last few years and are expected to continue to do so in the near future. However, due to the incredible complexity of the immune system, the team explained that it is prohibitively hard to predict how drugs will affect immune cells. A slight variation in cell therapy products can have a significant influence on a patient’s response to the therapy.Immunai services over a terabyte of data from a single blood sample, which is then mapped to hundreds of cell types and states to create immune profiles based on highlighting differentiated elements. The information can help answer important questions about the immune system by identifying subtle changes in cell type and state-specific expression, and can assist in distinguishing this from normal expression.“We developed the tools and know-how to help every immuno-oncology and cell therapy researcher excel at their job,” Voloch said in a release. “This helps increase the speed in which drugs are developed and brought to market by elucidating their mechanisms of action and resistance.”The team has already published peer-reviewed work on the origin of tumor-fighting T cells following programmed cell death protein 1 blockade, demonstrating the important findings its immune intelligence can uncover, and has additional publications under review.
Solomon said that while the company is first focused on immunological disorders, the next step will be to leverage the database to help treat everything from Alzheimer’s and heart disease to COVID-19 and any future viruses.
