Elephas, a Madison, WI-based company developing an ex-vivo platform to assess how live patient biopsies respond to immunotherapies, raised $55M in Series C funding.
The round, which brought the total amount to $116.5M, was led by Venture Investors Health Fund and State of Wisconsin Investment Board (SWIB), with participation from Northpond Ventures, ARCH Ventures, Sands Capital, Moore Strategic Ventures, Tao Invest, and WARF Ventures.
The company intends to use the funds to expand operations and its business reach.
Led by Maneesh Arora, founder and CEO, 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.
Elephas is conducting observational clinical trials to demonstrate that a patient’s clinical response to immunotherapy is correlated to the response data obtained by its platform, adding confidence the data generated from it 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 platform.