Paige, an NYC startup that is using artificial intelligence to help advance cancer research and care, announced Monday it has raised an additional $20 million from Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division and Healthcare Venture Partners. This, plus the $45 million investment the company announced last December, brings its Series B round total to $70 million.
The technology Paige uses was born out of Memorial Sloan Kettering, a leading cancer hospital also based out of NYC, by co-founders Dr. Thomas Fuchs and Dr. David Klimstra. It mainly focuses on improving an area of medicine called pathology, which looks at the cause and effect of diseases like cancer by analyzing, say, slides of tissue taken from a patient during a biopsy.
Paige allows doctors to share and view these slides digitally, without having to send them and view them in person under a microscope. The software looks at the sample and helps doctors make decisions by drawing from its database of tissue patterns from other previous cancer patients. Then, once a diagnosis is made, the doctor can upload that information to Paige so it can be used to help diagnose or treat someone else down the road.
The role of a pathologist is extremely important, says CEO Leo Grady, which means Paige’s job is just as important.
“Ultimately, the pathologist is going to have to make the decision of how to treat a patient and what the right diagnosis is, and that diagnosis is incredibly consequential. If you tell someone they have cancer and they don’t, or you tell them they don’t have cancer and they do, you can really affect their life in a dramatic way,” Grady told Built In. “This area of medicine is still very microscope based, it’s very analog. Now, with this new technology — both for digitizing the slides to scale and pattern matching to scale — it allows us to really start to provide new information to pathologists up and down the cancer spectrum, to help them do their job more effectively, and give them that additional information to improve the outcomes for patients.”
Grady says this technology can also be used to identify and study the outcomes of new treatments and even “tease apart” the different phenomena of various cancers and how they affect certain patients.
“I think that we can substantially and strongly impact the current practice of pathology and, consequently, cancer care. There’s so many avenues of working together with doctors and hospitals and the biotech industry in order to really develop new therapies, new diagnostics and new understandings of cancer, which is going to substantially impact cancer care and patient treatment,” Grady said. “We’re at the cusp of a lot of different technologies, whether it’s cloud, or cheap storage or digital slide scanning, AI. All of these things are coming together in a way that is really, for the first time, making this sort of technology possible.”
Paige’s capabilities are especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic. This technology allows doctors to continue to care for their patients from the safety of their homes, which is something that Grady anticipates will remain a priority in the cancer care industry going forward.
“Many [pathologists, hospitals and labs] are realizing that they need to make this transition and push to a digital workflow, so they’re looking at all of the different companies and providers that are able to provide a solution for them,” Grady said. “There’s only likely to be a few companies that define this field and Paige will be one of them.”
As for this $20 million, Grady says it will be used to break out into new cancer types (until now, the company has mainly been focused on prostate cancer) and work with biopharma companies to create new diagnosis and clinical trial solutions. The company also plans to double its headcount in the next six months.
