Precision medicine lowers the risks of treating lymphoma in dogs and eventually humans

PALO ALTO, Calif., April 12, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- ImpriMed, the cutting edge creator and researcher of custom, precision cancer treatment for canines, announced today that it has raised a total of $4 million in funding with participation from Draper Associates, Murex Partners, Plug & Play Ventures and the Stanford-StartX Fund. This financing includes $3.7 million in seed funding led by Draper Associates, and a previously unannounced $330 thousand pre-seed round led by Plug & Play Ventures.

ImpriMed uses precision medicine techniques to help veterinary oncologists to find out appropriate chemotherapies for individual dogs with cancer. Measuring hundreds of different drug responses on the patient’s fresh biopsy samples, ImpriMed observes how the live cancer cells react, before actual drug treatment. Their platform screens the most effective treatment options and excludes out non-effective ones as evidenced by testing, and provides this information to veterinarians to be administered to each specific patient as appropriate. Currently, lymphoma is the specific form of cancer that ImpriMed is focusing on treating in dogs. 

“Most human and veterinary precision medicine in the cancer field focuses on genomic information to predict drug responses of each patient,” said Hye Ryeon Lee, Co-founder and COO of ImpriMed. “Genomic data is invaluable, but it is nearly impossible to take into account all the complicated and complex interactions inside the cancer cells solely based on the genetic information. Here at ImpriMed, we obtain with functional data to show how each patient’s cancer cells react to various drug treatments, as well as collecting the genomic information.” Lee emphasized that combining functional data with genomic data will provide clinicians much more powerful prediction and more relevant information which can be implemented for safer and more effective treatments.

“ImpriMed will get us to a cancer cure faster,” said Tim Draper, Founder and Managing Partner of Draper Associates. “The data ImpriMed will be able to gain from their work on pets will allow cancer treatment development to accelerate at a much faster, while also helping the pets of the world.”

ImpriMed will use the new funding primarily to roll out their clinical trial, which will be performed primarily at SAGE Veterinary Centers in the Bay Area. This trial will refine processes and techniques that will enable this ground-breaking technology to start saving the lives of hundreds of dog cancer patients.

“We’ve already set up clinical relationships with most specialty animal hospitals in the San Francisco Bay Area, and now our service is available nationwide,” stated Sungwon Lim, Co-founder and CEO of ImpriMed. “When doctors and hospitals reach out to us, we systematically set up our service workflow to minimize related administrative burdens on physicians and technicians.”

The company aims to help treat more than 500 dogs by 2020, and is offering their service for free of charge for a limited time before completing their clinical trial.

About ImpriMed
ImpriMed develops a personalized drug testing service to look into drug responses of pet patient’s live cancer cells before treatment. The company helps veterinary oncologists decide a final treatment regimen based on data-driven prediction of response success in each individual patient body and builds up a patient-derived database for pet cancer treatment which can be eventually translated into human cancer care. Founded in 2017 by a team of Stanford PhD and postdoctoral fellows, the company is headquartered in Palo Alto, CA, with an additional presence in Seoul, South Korea. Learn more at www.imprimedicine.com.

Contact:
Hye Ryeon Lee
lee@imprimedicine.com