NEW YORK--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Ataraxis AI, the leading AI precision medicine company, today emerged from stealth with $4 million in seed financing co-led by Giant Ventures and Obvious Ventures. The funding, raised in 2023 but announced for the first time today, has enabled Ataraxis to develop groundbreaking AI-powered diagnostic tests that significantly enhance the prediction of patient outcomes and enable more precise, personalized treatments. The company also unveiled its first offering, Ataraxis Breast – the world’s first AI-native prognostic/predictive test for breast cancer and the most advanced clinically validated test available.
Molecular diagnostic tests have historically been considered the industry standard for personalized treatment selection, particularly in oncology. However, these tests rely on processing physical tissue and have significant limitations such as suboptimal accuracy, long development cycles, limited scope, and high costs.
To solve these challenges, Jan Witowski, MD, PhD, and Krzysztof Geras, PhD, founded Ataraxis AI. The company is developing multi-modal AI foundation models and diagnostic tests that predict patients' risk of cancer occurrence and outcomes, allowing providers to personalize treatments that will be most effective for each patient. Ataraxis plans to develop diagnostic tests for at least 50% of the 26 million new cancer patients expected to be diagnosed globally by 2030.
By creating this new category of tests, Ataraxis is transforming the future of cancer care, giving doctors powerful insights into their patients' health. This groundbreaking approach enables healthcare providers to craft highly personalized treatment plans, ensuring that every patient receives the most effective care possible.
“As a medical doctor, I was initially excited about the potential of precision medicine, having seen firsthand the urgent need for solutions to help hundreds of thousands of patients. Unfortunately, over the past decade, that promise has largely gone unfulfilled,” said Jan Witowski, co-founder and CEO of Ataraxis. “Building on our advisor Yann LeCun’s pioneering work in modern AI, we are establishing a completely new category of tests that will phase out molecular diagnostics, transitioning the industry to AI precision medicine—an approach that is more accurate, efficient, and cost-effective, with the potential to save countless more lives.”
To enable this new era of AI precision medicine Ataraxis has developed Kestrel, a foundation AI model for digital pathology that outperforms all existing state-of-the-art pathology foundation models. The Kestrel model discovers novel features correlated with patient outcomes that are often more complex than what can be understood by human experts, including physicians, and span all disease types. Using these findings, Ataraxis can develop multi-modal diagnostic tests for any indication that continuously improve in accuracy, can be applied quickly to any clinical scenario, have a wide scope, and are delivered in a software-like manner.
“Ataraxis has created a breast cancer outcome prediction system that produces personalized predictions with record-breaking accuracy. They are leveraging the latest developments in deep learning and AI such as self-supervised training and joint embedding architectures. Beyond this success, Ataraxis has an ambitious vision to bring about the transformative potential of AI in healthcare,” said Yann LeCun, Jacob T. Schwartz Professor of Computer Science at NYU, Chief AI Scientist at Meta, and Turing Award Laureate.
Using Kestrel, the company has created its first clinical diagnostic test, Ataraxis Breast. The test has initially been clinically validated in a multi-site study testing over 7,500 patients from 15 institutions across 3 continents, with plans for further validation. The results were published in a preprint publication and demonstrate that Ataraxis Breast greatly outperforms the current standard of care in breast cancer treatment selection, as evidenced by:
- 30% higher accuracy in predicting cancer recurrence than the standard of care molecular diagnostic assay.
- Reclassification of “intermediate risk” patients into low- or high-risk groups, helping more patients potentially avoid chemotherapy.
- Generalization across all cancer subtypes, expanding testing to 100,000 additional patients annually in the US alone.
- Answering new, high-value clinical questions (e.g. if patients who have undergone chemoendocrine therapy can benefit from CDK4/6 inhibitors).
- Best-in-class turnaround times and cost structure.
“Ataraxis has the potential to revolutionize cancer treatment, pioneering in a new era of AI-driven precision medicine that will elevate patient care and outcomes,” said Madelene Larsson, Principal at Giant Ventures. “Tissue biopsies provide one of the richest sources of medical data, and Jan and his team have developed a transformative approach using multi-modal AI models to help doctors identify treatment options beyond chemotherapy,” Rohan Ganesh, Partner at Obvious Ventures, added.
Patients from several of the world’s leading health systems and cancer care centers have participated in the validation of Ataraxis Breast, including Gundersen Health System, Karmanos Cancer Institute, NYU Langone Health, and Providence. The company plans to continue expanding its partnerships to make the test available to as many patients as possible.
About Ataraxis AI
Ataraxis is an AI precision medicine company transforming cancer diagnostics and patient outcomes through the power of artificial intelligence. Backed by leading investors Giant Ventures and Obvious Ventures, the company is addressing previously unsolvable problems in cancer prognosis and treatment selection through cutting-edge foundation models and multi-modal data. Ataraxis’ first clinically validated offering, Ataraxis Breast, is the world’s first AI-native prognostic/predictive test for breast cancer and provides greater accuracy than standard of care genomic assays. To learn more, visit ataraxis.ai.
