Elephas Biosciences Corporation (Elephas), a private company, announced today that it has raised $55 million in Series C funding. Venture Investors Health Fund and State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB) led the round. Continuing investments were made by Northpond Ventures, ARCH Ventures, Sands Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures, Tao Invest, and WARF Ventures. With this $55 million Series C funding, this brings the total raised by Elephas to $116.5 million.
Elephas is developing an oncology imaging diagnostics platform to predict response to immunotherapy using the latest advances in metabolic imaging. The platform utilizes live patient biopsies with intact native tumor architecture and treats them with potential therapies to predict response to treatment. The basis of the platform is to visualize immune cell activity including T cell activation and cytotoxic mediated killing. Read more about the latest scientific data presented by Elephas at the Society for Immunotherapy of Cancer (SITC) meeting in November 2023 here.
Elephas is conducting observational clinical trials to demonstrate that a patient’s clinical response to immunotherapy is correlated to the response data obtained by the Elephas platform, adding confidence the data generated from the platform can be used to predict response. The company also launched their biopharma services offering in 2023, partnering with biopharma companies to accelerate immunotherapy drug development using the Elephas platform.
Oncology drugs remain the largest pharmaceutical therapeutic area, with immunotherapies emerging in the last decade as powerful tools in the fight against cancer. However, despite the significant increase in the number of available immunotherapies, only 1 in 3 patients receiving immunotherapy frontline obtain a response and many who may respond are not eligible for therapy due to a lack of accurate predictive biomarkers.
“We remain intensely focused on our mission to improve care for cancer patients,” stated Maneesh Arora, founder and CEO of Elephas. “Supported by world class venture firms we are committed to building a platform that can help guide clinicians and enhance access to life-changing immunotherapies.”
“The Elephas platform holds immense promise to address a critical unmet need in predicting response to immunotherapy,” Venture Investors Health Fund’s Paul Weiss, added. “We are excited to work side by side with the company to pioneer a new diagnostic era for immunotherapy that will improve both access to therapy and outcomes for patients.”
XMS Capital Partners acted as financial advisor to the company.