Toronto-based Altis Labs has raised US$25 million in a Series A funding round to expand an artificial intelligence platform that predicts how cancer patients will respond to treatment months before traditional clinical trial measures can, the company said Sept. 17.
The round, worth roughly C$35 million, was co-led by New York-based OrbiMed and Qiming Venture Partners USA, with additional backing from Innovation Endeavors, Benchstrength, Fusion Fund and Toronto’s Lumira Ventures, which invested through its dedicated Cancer Breakthrough Fund. The financing brings outside capital, including from a Canadian life sciences investor, into a company built around one of the more specialized applications of AI in health care: reading radiology scans to forecast survival outcomes in oncology drug trials.
Altis’s core product, called IPRO, is trained on what the company describes as the industry’s largest multimodal oncology dataset, more than 500,000 patient-years of imaging, molecular, clinical and outcomes data. The model analyzes tumour scans taken during a trial and generates a prognostic score meant to flag, far earlier than conventional endpoints, whether a drug is actually working.
“Every clinical trial is fundamentally a learning process, and right now it is a slow one,” said Felix Baldauf-Lenschen, Altis’s founder and chief executive, in a statement announcing the round. “The faster and more accurately we can determine whether a treatment is truly delivering benefit to patients, the faster our biopharma partners can bring new effective medicines” to market.
The company points to an outside analysis of Johnson & Johnson’s Phase 3 MARIPOSA trial, a study of an EGFR-mutated lung cancer treatment, as its strongest evidence so far. Using roughly 10,000 scans from that trial, Altis says IPRO detected a treatment effect 11 months before standard progression-free survival results were available and 26 months ahead of final overall survival data, a gap that, if it holds up across other trials, could let drugmakers act on promising or failing therapies years sooner than they do now.
Tal Zaks, a partner at OrbiMed who previously spent years developing cancer therapies in the pharmaceutical industry, said in the same statement that early efficacy signals often fail to predict whether a drug will ultimately help patients, which is part of why investors are betting on AI tools built specifically to close that gap rather than general-purpose models retrofitted for health care.
Baldauf-Lenschen moved to Toronto from San Francisco in 2019 to start the company, and Altis has built its business around the city’s hospital networks and AI research base rather than relocating operations to the United States, a path several other Canadian tech founders have taken as they scale. Lumira Ventures, which is headquartered in Toronto with additional offices in Montreal, Vancouver and Boston, framed its participation as a bet on keeping oncology AI development anchored in Canada rather than ceding the field entirely to larger American and Chinese-backed competitors.
Altis says its technology is already used by 20 of the world’s largest biopharmaceutical companies across all four phases of clinical trials. The new funding will go toward extending IPRO to additional cancer types, deploying it with more global pharmaceutical partners and pushing to make AI-generated endpoints a standard part of how oncology trials are evaluated, rather than a supplementary tool. Whether regulators and drug companies adopt that standard more broadly will determine if Toronto’s approach to speeding up cancer trials becomes an industry fixture or stays a niche offering.
