
Armed with a $48M Series A, Auron is looking to apply machine learning in cancer treatment
The hype of machine learning has managed to bag serious cash from investors over the past year, and the latest biotech to enter the foray is looking to apply it to cancer.
Massachusetts-based Auron Therapeutics focuses on therapies that target dysregulated cells that can lead to tumors and cancer.
According to Auron CEO and founder Kate Yen, the biotech is developing therapies that target disrupted cellular differentiation. To do that it has built a proprietary machine learning and computational platform dubbed AURigin. The platform allows it to integrate multi omics data sets from both normal human tissue and tumor samples to help identify pathways that are critical for both normal cellular differentiation and then how those pathways have been hijacked by tumor cells.
“By understanding how tumor cells have hijacked normal cellular differentation processes, we can identify novel targets to perturb with the goal of causing cancer cells to stop proliferating by promoting terminal differentiation, and/or cell death,” Yen told Endpoints News.
According to Yen, the reason the company went with machine learning models is because it allows Auron to understand the pathways that are critical for promoting normal differentiation. And the machine learning algorithms also allow biomarkers to be identified that can accurately predict different stages of normal differentiation and how those biomarkers are dysregulated in the tumor cells.
“By building those models, we can track how these markers are different in cancer cells determine drivers of dysregulated differentiation in cancer and ultimately identify novel targets,” she said.
Funds from the round give the company a runway of two years, Yen said, which will be used to advance Auron’s lead program toward clinical development and drive additional programs into eventual drug discovery, but no timeline has been set for that. It will also be used to expand the AURigin platform as well as bring on four to five staff members.
The company currently sits at 11 staff members.
Yen sees the company, by targeting cellular differentiation, as what sets them apart from the competition.
“Most current cancer therapies don’t target cellular differentiation, but rather attack rapidly dividing cells like chemotherapy, or they focus on targeting pathways that affect proliferation and tumor growth,” she said. “Our approach is to target altered differentiation pathways to push patients into long-term durable treatment responses. We think this opens up an untapped opportunity to bring novel therapies to patients.”
The round was led by DCVC Bio with support from new investors Mubadala Capital and Apollo Health Ventures. Existing investors who participated include Arkin Bio Ventures, Polaris Partners, Qiming Venture Partners USA, Eli Lilly, the American Cancer Society’s investment arm BrightEdge, Franklin Berger and Casdin Capital.