Startup Of The Week

Startup Of The Week: Immunai

Immunai, which specializes in mapping the immune system, is helping hospitals, research centers and large pharma companies such as AstraZeneca and Teva optimize clinical trials in immunology and immuno-oncology.

It is one of 120 unicorns – young tech companies with valuations of one billion or more – and Tech Pioneers invited by the World Economic Forum to its annual meeting in Davos January 20-24.

Founded in 2018, Immunai uses single-cell multiomics, a technique to understand the genomic and proteomic makeup of cells at their cellular level, together with  machine learning to discover and improve the development of novel therapeutics by decoding the immune system and how it is being affected by therapeutics.

The startup’s  AMICA platform—Annotated Multi-Omic Immune Cell Atlas—is reportedly the world’s largest single-cell immune knowledge base. It includes close to a hundred million cells mapped across hundreds of disease settings and integrates over 5,000 studies, including more than 350 single-cell investigations.

AMICA encompasses data on over 80 immune cell types, spanning 500 diseases, with insights derived from more than 10,000 patient samples with single-cell and more than 370,000 patients with bulk measurements, with the ambition to get AMICA to be a billion cell atlas in the next three years. This resource powers Immunai’s AI-powered “Immunodynamics Engine,” which combines functional genomics and advanced AI to uncover therapeutic biomarkers, validate or refute therapeutic hypotheses, and identify patient subgroups for clinical trials.

“Most biotech companies focus on drug discovery by optimizing clinical trial design and drug development. Our mission is to make drug development effective and financially viable,” says Co-founder and CEO Noam Solomon, who was accepted into university at the age of 14  and trained in AI and machine learning in the 8200 Israeli Intelligence Corps unit of the Israel Defense Forces.

Solomon says Immunai is the first to map the immune system, a difficult task that many thought was impossible given that was thought to be infinitely complex. “ I am a mathematician and mathematicians like to count things, count even infinities, but the immune system is not infinitely complex, just incredibly complex“says Solomon. “My response was that if everyone thinks this way, we have an advantage.”

The company was founded in 2018, and the founders were helped on their journey but what Solomon describes as a perfect storm. There was a boom in AI algorithms  that led to a tectonic shift in the entire tech industry, compute power became stronger and was becoming cheaper and available – and the third element was the emergence of single cell technologies a couple of years before Immunai was founded,      which allowed Immunai to measure the RNA of cells from tissues at the cellular level.

Immunai produces multiomic data from clinical and preclinical samples using cutting edge wet lab and computational pipelines. These are transformed into a uniform single-cell data foundation. The generated data is harmonized  and integrated into AMICA, Immunai’s immune focused single cell database. Next  Immunai leverages its advanced AI platform to compute novel immune features, linking immune mechanisms to treatment responses and outcomes.

By integrating its vast database and immune knowledge the company says it enhances analytical power to deliver deeper, more precise insights and increase confidence in decision-making. It can answer questions such as what patient population should receive the drug? or how does the drug’s mechanism of action compare to the standard of care? This helps pharma companies optimize drug development strategies, Solomon says.

Solomon frames Immunai’s mission as stopping the decades-long divergence of computer science and the life sciences. While the single biggest factor driving the explosion of computing has been Moore’s Law ability to exponentially increase the number of transistors on a chip over the past 60 years, in the pharmaceutical industry, the reverse is happening: By one estimate, the cost of developing a new drug roughly doubles every nine years. The phenomenon has been dubbed Eroom’s Law (“Eroom” for “Moore” spelled backward). Solomon sees the trend hurting the case for developing new drugs, due to the escalating cost and the fact that  there’s only a 5 % to 10% chance that any given clinical trial will be successful.

Immunai’s technology  improves the preclinical and clinical stages of drug development, says Solomon. But this is just the beginning. “Right now, we are helping to improve clinical trials, but my vision is to use the same platform to optimize preventive medicine by regularly measuring people’s immune system and catch people before they get sick,” he says. “By measuring the immune system regularly, we will be able to identify things not only early on but even before the formation of disease pathology.”

Growing Through Acquisitions And Collaborations

To enrich AMICA, its immune cell database  Immunai acquired Dropprint Genomics, a Y-combinator-backed single-cell genomics software company, in 2021. The same year it acquired Nebion, a world leader in biocuration and data integration, which Immunai says has accelerated AMICA’s growth and broadened its application to inflammatory and oncological research.

Immunai has partnered with more than 40 biopharma companies and medical research centers and is working with six big pharmaceutical companies.

In November it announced that it has partnered with Teva Pharmaceuticals in a multi-year collaboration aimed at improving clinical trial outcomes for oncology and immunology therapies.

The companies said the collaboration will use Immunai’s proprietary immune cell atlas, AMICA, and its AI-powered Immunodynamics Engine to enhance clinical decision-making. This tech will help deepen the understanding of drug mechanisms of action, optimize dose selection, and analyze biomarkers to improve trial success rates and patient outcomes.

In September Immunai announced a multi-year collaboration with AstraZeneca. Under the terms of the agreement Immunai is set to receive $18 million for the initial phase of the collaboration. The collaboration will focus on clinical decision-making, including dose selection, elucidating mechanisms of action, patient responder vs. non-responder analysis, and biomarker identification, by leveraging Immunai’s AI model of the immune system, the IDE. This collaboration aims to improve the success rates of ongoing clinical trials to maximize research and development productivity. After this initial phase, AstraZeneca has an option to expand the length and scope of the collaboration.

The company, which is headquartered in New York City and has offices in Tel Aviv, Prague and Zurich, has raised $300 million to date.

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About the author

Jennifer L. Schenker

Jennifer L. Schenker, an award-winning journalist, has been covering the global tech industry from Europe since 1985, working full-time, at various points in her career for the Wall Street Journal Europe, Time Magazine, International Herald Tribune, Red Herring and BusinessWeek. She is currently the editor-in-chief of The Innovator, an English-language global publication about the digital transformation of business. Jennifer was voted one of the 50 most inspiring women in technology in Europe in 2015 and 2016 and was named by Forbes Magazine in 2018 as one of the 30 women leaders disrupting tech in France. She has been a World Economic Forum Tech Pioneers judge for 20 years. She lives in Paris and has dual U.S. and French citizenship.