Though still hard at work untangling the biology of patient-specific drug responses, Scipher Medicine has already solved another very important piece of the startup puzzle: fundraising.
Less than a year after locking down an $82 million series C, Scipher has closed another even bigger funding round. This time around, it raked in $110 million, just about doubling its lifetime total, which now sits at $227 million.
The financing was led by Cowen Healthcare Investments. Other investors both old and new included Neuberger Berman, Hitachi Ventures, Laurion Capital, Monashee Investment Management, Khosla Ventures, Optum Ventures, Echo Health Ventures and Alumni Ventures, as well as Northpond Ventures and aMoon, which together headed up the previous round.
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Along with leading the financing, Cowen will also send Tim Anderson, its partner and head of research, as a representative to Scipher’s board of directors.
The additional funding will help Scipher continue its work to develop a line of blood tests that are able to predict how individuals will respond to specific drugs and drug classes.
Its platform uses artificial intelligence to compare each patient’s molecular signature to Scipher’s interactome, a vast library of biological data showing how various molecules interact with one another. The resulting analysis can determine the patient’s unique disease signature, predict their response to a range of currently available drugs and identify potential molecular targets to help develop drugs for those who won’t respond to existing treatments.
Scipher’s work is initially focusing on autoimmune diseases, which are believed to affect up to 8% of Americans. Because these conditions cause an individual’s immune system to attack itself, there’s no one-size-fits-all cure, meaning treatment must be specific to each patient’s genetic makeup.
“Precision medicine has transformed oncology in ways we could only imagine a decade ago. The next frontier to tackle is autoimmune diseases, where very few, if any, solutions exist today,” Anderson said in a statement.
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Scipher’s first blood test, PrismRA, is designed to shape treatment plans for rheumatoid arthritis (RA). It looks at how patients will respond to tumor necrosis factor inhibitor, or TNFi, therapy, a class of drugs that are prescribed to the vast majority of RA patients but are clinically effective in only about one-third of those prescribed, according to the company.
Recently published study results showed that RA treatment plans that were guided by PrismRA test results experienced three times the success rate of those that weren’t. Even further, when some study participants were given TNFi therapies despite their PrismRA tests indicating that they wouldn’t respond to the drug class, about 90% did indeed fail to respond to the therapy, which Scipher suggested means its tests could save time and money and improve outcomes if their results are heeded.