The title pretty much says it all. Pear Bio is a company that uses computer vision to help the medical sector and doctors fight cancer. The technology is based on computer vision. Combined with analysis of the patient’s microtumors, Pear Bio is able to recreate core parts of the human tumor microenvironment for accurate lab testing. It’s medtech at its best.
The origin story – who built the company and what does it do?
Pear Bio is a computational biology company. It was founded by CEO and founder,Duleek Ranatunga, had previously worked in tissue engineering, 3D printing and medical statistics during his studies thus he was exposed to the field of research and early commercial applications.
The founder didn’t miss the mark, since precision medicine was starting to kick off. Duleek Ranatunga and his nanotechnology engineer co-founder William Lin began hiring academics with backgrounds in cutting edge tissue engineering and whose expertise aided in the design and analysis of proof-of-concept experiments.
Pear Bio is currently helping patients, oncologists, and pharmaceutical companies by working on both immuno-oncology patient tests and an in-house drug discovery pipeline. They focus on the unmet need of treating patients that are non-responsive to the currently approved therapies. Pear Bio is revolutionising the path towards future cancer drug discovery and taking initiative to develop the tailored therapeutics and precision medicines.
Pear Bio is revolutionizing the way cancer treatments are assigned to patients. They have developed a functional precision medicine platform by integrating tissue engineering, confocal microscopy, and computer vision. They were able to incorporate these into a single patient stratification tool. With it, it’s possible to do the modeling of the impact a drug or a combination of drugs has on the progression of disease.
Pear Bio’s pipeline bypasses the limitations of genomics testing. This ‘conventional’ way of testing involves taking a tumor sample and looking for mutations to identify working therapies. Unfortunately, only half of cancer patients actually benefit from this approach. It’s because of the complexity of some cancer types, particularly those that are biomarker-negative.
Pear Bio looks beyond the cancer cell – namely, the tumour microenvironment, by modelling its dynamic behaviour through time and its response to blocking certain pathways (e.g., checkpoint signalling) that are responsible for tumour proliferation, immune evasion and metastasis. Pear Bio’s methods enables patients to be matched with effective experimental drugs whilst improving patient response rate by addressing their individual differences. Tailoring the anti-cancer treatment to each unique patient is the goal here.
The company has added immuno-oncology capabilities to the precision medicine platform. They are able to track immune cell infiltration into patient-derived 3D tumor cultures using time-lapsed 3D microscopy.
The business model and revenue streams
Pear Bio helps through the personalization of cancer medicine, performing clinical trials, and pharma research & development. The company has raised a $14m Series A round led by Octopus Ventures, with participation from Hoxton Ventures, Crista Galli Ventures, SOSV, Fly Ventures, and Compound Ventures.
Everything is based on the idea of pipelines, where medical organizations alongside with doctors and patients can benefit from trials. Pear Bio has an oncology and immune-oncology diagnostics. They also have target and drug discovery process. Within these, they participate in early R&D stage, optimize analytical workflow, perform retrospective and prospective testing. It’s a wide range, since they miss only interventional and pivotal trials.
Summary
Computational biology is the future of medicine. Treatment personalization is everything, since everything is energy. It’s up to the doctor to spot matching energy and treatment.
Products and services like these change the landscape of care. That’s why, as a Code & Pepper, we have established our own protocols to create apps and services for our clients. We offer AI-powered software development. We hire only the top 1.6% of talents on the market. Having a method to spot them, we are able to deliver business value in every project.
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