NEW YORK – Israeli precision oncology and proteomics startup OncoHost said on Tuesday it has raised $8 million in a Series B funding round, led by investment platform OurCrowd.
The company uses proteomic analysis combined with machine learning on patient blood samples to better understand their response to therapy and detect signs of resistance to treatment through the company's Prophet platform. The funding will be used to finance OncoHost's clinical trials, open a US-based affiliate, and launch Prophet.
OncoHost has ongoing clinical trials for Prophet in melanoma and non-small cell lung cancer. The company presented data from the melanoma trial at the 2020 American Society of Clinical Oncology conference. In that study of 34 melanoma patients, the platform identified a 10-protein signature that can help predict which patients will respond to treatment. The researchers also identified multiple mechanisms of resistance in the patients who did not respond to treatment. The company is validating these findings in a larger cohort study.
"This investment round supports our mission to better predict response to immunotherapy and identify personalized treatment options for cancer patients, as we continue to expand our collaboration with pharma on clinical trials and drug development," Ofer Sharon, OncoHost CEO, said in a statement. "Proteomic analysis is allowing us to make great advances in personalized cancer care, and we are grateful to our investors for their support in the midst of this particularly challenging time of a global pandemic."
Last year, OncoHost received a $1 million grant from the Israel-US Binational Industrial Research and Development (BIRD) Foundation to support its research in NSCLC. The company was founded in 2017.