Altis Labs announced Thursday it secured $25 million in Series A funding to expand technology that promises to tell drugmakers whether experimental cancer treatments work years before traditional trial endpoints deliver answers.
OrbiMed and Qiming Venture Partners USA co-led the round, with participation from Innovation Endeavors, Benchstrength, Fusion Fund and Cancer Breakthrough Fund. The Toronto startup declined to disclose its valuation, though the fresh capital follows a $6 million seed round it announced in June 2023.
The company's pitch centers on what many in oncology consider an uncomfortable truth: the imaging measures used to greenlight or kill cancer drugs often fail to predict whether patients actually live longer. Tumor shrinkage looks promising on a scan, regulatory agencies allow accelerated approvals based on that shrinkage, and then survival data sometimes reveals the drugs didn't help at all. A 2023 Journal of Clinical Oncology analysis by FDA authors termed the disconnect "Irreconcilable Differences."
Altis believes its IPRO imaging model can collapse that gap. The technology analyzes routine CT scans collected during clinical trials and generates survival predictions using what the company describes as a training set of more than 500,000 patient-years of data. CEO Felix Baldauf-Lenschen, who previously worked at medical imaging AI firm Enlitic and investment firm Cambridge Associates, frames the problem as one of inefficient learning. "Every clinical trial is fundamentally a learning process, and right now it is a slow one," he said in the funding announcement.
The company received external validation just days before announcing the raise. On September 13, Johnson & Johnson presented an independent analysis of Altis technology at the World Conference on Lung Cancer in Seoul. The J&J analysis found that Altis's IPRO Response Rate detected a statistically significant treatment effect in the Phase 3 MARIPOSA lung cancer trial 11 months before the study's primary progression-free survival readout became available. Final overall survival data took 26 months. The standard RECIST objective response rate, meanwhile, failed to predict the survival benefit, according to the analysis.
Those timelines matter in an industry where failed late-stage trials can erase billions in market value overnight. If imaging AI can reliably signal efficacy earlier, drugmakers gain months or even years to redirect resources, potentially saving the roughly 90% of cancer drugs that fail in clinical development.
Altis delivers its predictions through a platform called Nota and says it counts several top-20 biopharma companies among its users. Named collaborators include Johnson & Johnson Innovative Medicine, AstraZeneca, Bayer, University Health Network and Hamilton Health Sciences. The startup currently focuses on lung and colorectal cancers but plans to expand across additional cancer types with the new funding.
OrbiMed noted in the announcement that Altis has assembled "the industry's most comprehensive longitudinal oncology dataset linking imaging and outcomes." Qiming Venture Partners USA called earlier efficacy measurement "the most impactful application of AI in drug development," though such declarations have become common as venture firms compete to back AI healthcare plays.
The space is getting crowded. Unlearn.AI creates external control arms for trials using synthetic patients. Median Technologies offers central imaging services and AI software specifically for oncology studies. Imaging Endpoints, one of the largest oncology imaging contract research organizations, is developing AI-powered endpoints. Owkin builds AI biomarkers and has secured regulatory engagement from the European Medicines Agency.
Altis co-founder Sally Daub chairs the board. The company said it intends to position AI-derived endpoints as a new standard for oncology trials, an ambition that will likely require not just technical validation but also regulatory comfort from agencies historically cautious about replacing established measures.
Whether the technology can deliver on its promise at scale remains an open question, though the Johnson & Johnson data offers a notable early signal. For now, Altis has capital and partnerships to find out.
