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LinkedIn Cofounder Hoffman’s New AI Oncology Startup Raises $25 Million

Behind the blinding white light of Monday’s trillion–dollar AI wipeout that was a spot of unabashedly good AI news.

Photo of Reid Hoffman
Photo by https://www.flickr.com/photos/techcrunch/29658718755/ via CC BY 2.0

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Behind the blinding white light of the trillion-dollar artificial intelligence wipeout that was the talk of markets Monday was a spot of unabashedly good AI news.

Manas AI, an oncology startup co-led by LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman, raised $24.6 million to use the technology to identify drug candidates to help treat breast cancer, lymphoma and prostate cancer.

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The promise of generative AI in medical research — that it should be able to parse mass troves of biological data to pinpoint potential new treatments — is straightforward. But the results, so far at least, leave a lot to be desired. No drug candidates have been approved from this method, which other startups are also employing. AI has found use in surgeries, medical imaging and in identifying protein structures, which is key to drug research.

Hoffman’s co-founder, Columbia University professor and cancer researcher Siddhartha Mukherjee told The Wall Street Journal that he’s confident in AI’s ability to model treatments, and at a pace beyond what humans are capable of: “AI was a mechanism to scale — vastly — the kinds of work that we were doing in any one laboratory, and across diseases.” Keeping the faith is one thing, the other is money:

  • Manas’ funding round was led by Hoffman himself. Joining him were venture capital giants General Catalyst — which has poured hundreds of millions into healthcare and plans to invest much more — and Greylock Partners — which turns 60 this year, making it an elder statesman of the VC world.
  • While AI research into drug discovery has come up short on transforming the industry, investors are still placing bets on its future. Startups in the sector raised $3.3 billion last year, five times their 2023 haul, according to PitchBook. Of note were a $130 million round for nature-based drug discovery startup Enveda and $300 million for quantum AI startup SandboxAQ, which is partly focused on drug discovery.

Know Your Worth: In unrelated biotech news, Sage Therapeutics rejected a $442 million buyout offer from its longtime pharma giant partner Biogen on Monday. The Cambridge, Massachusetts, firm’s shares declined 75% in value last year after a series of candidates, including potential treatments for Huntington’s and essential tremor, flopped at trial. While Sage said it’s open to a deal, it thinks it’s worth more than that as it doubles down on upping the adoption of its approved postpartum depression drug Zurzuvae.