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This past year was one of learning, growing, and finding success at Known Medicine. The structure of our company, our platform, and even our offices have developed beyond what we had imagined at this stage. Our mission to improve the lives of cancer patients has remained a clear guide as we build a predictive engine to determine the best treatment for every cancer.
With the start of the new year, it’s important to reflect on the accomplishments we’ve celebrated and the lessons learned from the previous year. Just a year ago, Katie-Rose and I, as a team of two, were leaving for the holidays, knowing that we would return in 2021 to a team of four. In 2021, our company returned from the holidays to Altitude Lab with merely two desks and a single wet-lab bench to build our first platform. In February, we moved into our Research Park lab space, giving us 4,300 sq ft — walking into that space, the four of us believed it should last a few years and imagined future growth. Looking back at that moment, it’s hard not to feel naïve. We quickly outgrew this space as our team tripled, and by the end of 2021 we had expanded into a 7,300 sq ft space to accommodate our more sophisticated platform and larger team.
In 2021, we also announced our seed round, raising $7.2 million led by Caffeinated Capital, with participation from Khosla Ventures, Cota Capital, Kickstart, Forward VC, OATV, Y Combinator and noted angel investors Chris Gibson, CEO & Co-Founder at Recursion Pharmaceuticals, Nish Bhat, Co-Founder at Color Genomics, and others.
Most notably, we advanced our platform and our ability to improve cancer patients’ lives. We have created a robust and high-throughput platform, expanded treatment modalities, and increased our clinical partnerships. Our platform has advanced from a basic robotic method to a fully automated protocol, in which we are able to process dozens of patient tumors each week. Each tumor enables us to better understand how patients respond to different drug treatments. We pursued CLIA certification to ensure our platform was robust and held our validation standards to that of on-market diagnostics. We have generated millions of images of micro-tumors and trained machine learning-based insights into cancer treatment responses. We have advanced beyond chemo and target treatment modalities, building and putting into production our immunotherapy platform, which includes a pre-screen of patient eligibility. To build this platform, we expanded our clinical feasibility study to include seven centers around the U.S. who provide lung and colorectal cancer samples. With over 140 samples received in just the last year, we are expecting to multiply our sample dataset 10 times in the next 18 months. Ultimately, we are working to determine the best treatment for every cancer, for every patient.
Reflecting on 2021, I’m blown away by what we have accomplished in the past 12 months. Our fully automated platform has allowed us to understand how different patient populations respond to drug treatments. We’re now able to use this knowledge and our growing understanding of cell diversity to discover and develop better drugs for patient subpopulations.
In 2022, our sights are set on even greater accomplishments. As we focus on drug discovery and development, the year to come has many ambitious goals. We will increase our platform capacity by 10X, grow our data set through our newly created multi-center research consortium to over 600 tumors, and develop biomarkers in-house to determine the most effective novel drug treatments for cancer.
None of the progress made would have been possible without our stellar team. We’re able to set big goals because of the drive and dedication of everyone at Known Medicine. Interested in joining our team to improve cancer patient lives? Apply through our current listings or reach out directly to hr@knownmed.com.
The Future is Known
