Latent Space (Swyx) analyst · 1d ago · 3/5
🔬 Training Transformers to solve 95% failure rate of Cancer Trials — Ron Alfa & Daniel Bear, Noetik ↗
Noetik, an AI biotech company, secured a $50M licensing agreement with GSK that includes long-term deals for models like TARIO-2, a transformer trained on tumor spatial transcriptomics data. The company's AI predicts patient responses to experimental treatments by analyzing tumor biology, potentially improving the 95% failure rate in cancer clinical trials without developing new drugs. The deal represents pharma's growing appetite for AI software tools rather than in-house drug development, focusing on cohort selection and treatment matching.
95% of cancer treatments fail to pass clinical trials, but it may be a matching problem — if we better understood what patients have which tumors which will respond to which treatments, success rates improve dramatically.
Many of these 'failed' treatments actually work! But we're not looking at the right patients with the right tumors.