Scipher Medicine®, a precision immunology company matching patients with the most effective therapy, announced the completion of its Series C financing led by aMoon and Northpond Ventures, with participation from Echo Health Ventures and existing investors, Khosla Ventures and Alumni Ventures. To date, the company has raised $117 million.
An estimated $630 billion is wasted each year when patients are prescribed drugs they don’t respond to, placing an undue clinical and financial burden on the healthcare system at large. The majority of rheumatoid arthritis patients prescribed the world’s largest selling drug class, tumor necrosis factor inhibitors (TNFi) therapy, don’t respond to treatment at a per-patient cost of over $65,000 per year, even though alternative effective drugs are available in the market.
Scipher Medicine will use proceeds to expand commercial efforts for its patient molecular signature test, PrismRA®, ensuring rheumatoid arthritis patients are prescribed optimal targeted therapy from day one, and data collaborations to discover novel treatment targets based on their large and growing patient clinico-genomic database generated from tested patients.
“With more data being generated from tested patients every day, we are continuously serving our provider, payer, and pharma partnerships with unique insights into the most optimal treatment pathway for patients with autoimmune diseases,” said Alif Saleh, Chief Executive Officer at Scipher. “We are thrilled to have the support of our investor partners as we continue on our endeavor of using data to ensure improved patient care is at the center of healthcare.”
“There is a significant opportunity to bring precision medicine solutions to autoimmune diseases especially for rheumatoid arthritis to address a critical unmet need,” said Todd Sone, General Partner at aMoon. “We are incredibly excited about PrismRA and honored to join Scipher on this journey towards a future where precision medicine is applied across healthcare to ensure patients are prescribed the most effective therapy.”
“Providing access to tests such as PrismRA is critical to delivering optimal care for patients with rheumatoid arthritis while ensuring that specialty drug spend is directed towards effective therapies that actually help autoimmune patients live a better life,” said Kurt Sheline, Principal at Echo Health Ventures. “Scipher’s approach to ensuring therapy is directed to appropriate patients creates cross-stakeholder alignment towards higher quality, more cost-effective care.”
“A significant number of patients are continuously taking suboptimal drugs. To ameliorate this, it is important to analyze a patient’s individual molecular signature to ensure optimal therapy is prescribed. Scipher Medicine is a leader in precision medicine for autoimmune disease, as indicated with the release of their PrismRA test,” said Michael P. Rubin, M.D., Ph.D., CFA, Founder and CEO at Northpond Ventures. “We continue to be impressed with how the team is executing on its vision to use its Network Medicine platform to transform the understanding of disease and drug selection across the healthcare system.”
