SAN FRANCISCO– Noetik, an AI-native biotechnology company leveraging advanced machine learning and proprietary data to discover and develop precision cancer immunotherapies announces the pairing of their multimodal human data atlas with an innovative in vivo functional genomics platform to power the development of precision cancer immunotherapies. The platform builds on Perturb-map, a groundbreaking spatial functional genomics technology that allows pooled parallel analysis of hundreds of genetically modified tumor clones in a single experiment. Noetik’s platform will evaluate the impact of genetic variants at an unprecedented in vivo scale. The company is currently generating an initial dataset of >650 mutations in a preclinical model of lung cancer, including pharmacological perturbations.
“Functional genomics has been invaluable to annotate genes’ function,” says Maxime Dhainaut, Ph.D. the Director of Spatial Functional Genomics at Noetik, who developed Perturb-map in the laboratory of Brian Brown, Ph.D., at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, “but current approaches struggle to perform gene interrogation at scale in a biologically relevant context. High throughput in vivo screens are incompatible with cell phenotyping, and high content phenotypic screens are mostly restricted to in vitro models that seldom recapitulate complex immune biology. The ability to resolve perturbations directly in the tissue, preserving the spatial context, is going to be transformative. Not only will we dramatically increase the throughput of phenotypic characterization of perturbations in vivo, but we can begin to identify genetic programs that orchestrate the complex spatial architecture of the tumor.”
Noetik is also proud to announce that Dr. Brown, Director of the Icahn Genomics Institute and Associate Director of the Marc and Jennifer Lipschultz Precision Immunology Institute at Icahn Mount Sinai, has joined the Noetik Scientific Advisory Board. “There is an important need for drugs that can remodel the tumor microenvironment, which means we first need to better understand how cells interact and influence each other in a complex tissue environment,” says Dr. Brown. “Noetik understands these challenges and is building impressive infrastructure and datasets to address them.” Dr. Brown will bring his extensive experience in immuno-oncology, genetics, and technology development and will contribute to Noetik’s pipeline of innovative precision immunotherapies.
Jacob Rinaldi, Ph.D, CSO & Co-Founder, Noetik emphasized: “Existing preclinical models poorly replicate human cancer biology, and cannot reveal more complex phenotypes at scale. Building on Perturb-map, we are developing a system to test complex functional genetics and pharmacological hypotheses at scale – creating iterative feedback between machine learning models of human disease and causal interventions in vivo. This is what the future of drug discovery will look like.”
