Revolutionizing Cancer Immunotherapy with AI: Wittington Ventures’ Investment in Noetik
At Wittington Ventures, we believe artificial intelligence will revolutionize healthcare — we have already started to see it through our investments in Abridge and Unlearn — and today, we’re excited to announce our investment in the $40M Series A financing of Noetik, a company redefining cancer treatment.
Noetik was founded by Ron Alfa and Jacob Rinaldi, world-leading experts in computational biology who previously spent time building Recursion Pharmaceuticals’ oncology platform. With a focus on the growing field of immuno-oncology (“IO”), Noetik has harnessed AI and proprietary data to create a foundation model for tumor biology, allowing it to develop new cancer therapeutics through identifying novel targets and predicting immune system response. In parallel, the company has developed a cutting-edge in vivo testing system, grounded in spatial CRISPR representation, that allows it to rapidly assess and iterate its therapeutic hypotheses. Coupled with its tumor biology models, the company will leverage these platform capabilities to advance an innovative pipeline of cancer therapeutic candidates to the clinic at scale.
Our investment in Noetik represents another step in our mission to support innovations that have the potential to dramatically improve patient outcomes while bending the healthcare cost curve. We believe the market is coming of age for AI-powered drug discovery companies and are eager to support Noetik as it advances cancer care and helps bring new, effective therapeutics to market faster using its sophisticated machine learning platform.
The Need for New Cancer Therapeutics
Cancer remains one of the most challenging diseases to treat due to its inherent complexity and the heterogeneous nature of tumor tissues. Unlike simpler diseases, cancer is influenced by a multitude of genetic, cellular, and tissue-level processes that vary widely between each patient. This variability makes predicting a drug’s efficacy in any given patient incredibly difficult. The challenge is especially acute in IO, one of the fastest-growing and most promising fields in cancer treatment, where therapies aim to harness the immune system to combat cancer. Many of the pathways targeted by these treatments remain poorly understood, and critical targets are still unidentified. For instance, while IO treatments such as Keytruda (a PD-L1 inhibitor) have been groundbreaking, its efficacy is limited to only the 20–30% of patients whose tumors express sufficient levels of the PD-L1 protein. The need for new breakthroughs that address the diverse and complex pathways in other patient populations is urgent.
The past decade has seen significant progress in cancer therapy, with advancements in targeted treatments, immunotherapies, and precision medicine offering new hope. In parallel, AI-focused drug discovery companies (“TechBio” companies) are now making their mark, with 8 drugs in Phase II trials and over 30 drugs in Phase I. While this progress is non-trivial, the road to get there has been long and arduous. We believe that in order to truly supercharge drug discovery to bring therapies to patients more quickly and cost-effectively, TechBio companies will need to shift from traditional supervised learning models to self-supervised foundation models that can understand disease biology at the individual patient level.
Noetik’s Groundbreaking Approach to Precision Oncology
Noetik has developed an end-to-end platform that generates hypotheses with AI (in silico) and tests them in a scalable, repeatable fashion (in vivo). The platform is anchored by a proprietary generative AI model, OCTO (Oncology Counterfactual Therapeutics Oracle) — the first model to truly understand cancer biology. Unlike traditional models, OCTO is a multimodal, transformer-based model, trained on extensive, multimodal data generated from thousands of tumor samples in Noetik’s lab and its in vivo system. This proprietary data captures the intricate molecular drivers and tumor-immune interactions across hundreds of millions of cells.
With this rich dataset, OCTO simulates patient biology to predict responses to hypothetical treatments. It’s validated through counterfactual scenarios, such as predicting how altering a gene’s expression might impact protein behavior within a cell. OCTO can also reconstruct high-resolution images that reveal biologically critical features, like spatial relationships between proteins — features often undetectable by humans and traditional models. This capability enables OCTO to identify novel targets and pathways in previously unknown biology. Noetik uses the output from this process, combined with its proprietary in vivo system, to identify and push forward existing and new drug candidates into its pipeline at scale.
OCTO: AI-Powered Image Reconstruction Differentiating Tumor and Immune Cells
Why Wittington Ventures is Excited About Noetik
Our investment in Noetik is a significant step in our mission to support innovations that have the potential to redefine healthcare. Noetik is at the forefront of a transformative shift in AI drug discovery and has one of the most impressive end-to-end platforms that we’ve seen that combines cutting edge cancer foundation models with unique, proprietary data. Moreover, Noetik has a world-class team. Ron and Jacob are joined by industry veterans such as Lacey Padron (ex-VP of Informatics at the Parker Institute for Cancer Immunotherapy) and Shafique Virani (ex-Chief Business Officer at Recursion) who bring deep scientific expertise and a proven track record of bringing therapeutics to the clinic.
We are thrilled to be investing alongside leading biotech and technology investors including Polaris Partners, DCVC, Khosla Ventures and others. As Noetik continues to progress, we are excited to see the profound impact its technology will have on patients worldwide.
