Meet Pear Bio: Revolutionising the way cancer treatments are assigned to patients

Company: Pear Bio

Location: London, UK

Founding Year: 2017

Co-founder: Duleek Ranatunga

Tech summary:

Pear Bio is revolutionising the way cancer treatments are assigned to patients. They have developed a functional precision medicine platform by integrating tissue engineering, confocal microscopy, and computer vision into a single patient stratification tool. This facilitates the assessment of the treatment efficacy in the human tumour microenvironment by modelling the impact a drug or a combination of drugs has on the progression of disease.

Pear Bio’s pipeline bypasses the limitations of genomics testing. This ‘conventional’ way of testing involves taking a tumour sample and looking for mutations to identify suitable therapies. However, it has been found that less than half of cancer patients actually benefit from this approach, due to the complexity of some cancer types, particularly those that are biomarker-negative. For the latter, there was little correlation between mutations found through a genomics approach and a patient’s response to treatment due to the complexity of certain cancers and certain therapies or combination therapies. Pear Bio looks beyond the cancer cell – namely, the tumour microenvironment, by modelling its dynamic behaviour through time and its response to blocking certain pathways (e.g., checkpoint signalling) that are responsible for tumour proliferation, immune evasion and metastasis. Pear Bio’s promising pipeline enables patients to be matched with effective experimental drugs whilst improving patient response rate by addressing their individual differences and tailoring the anti-cancer treatment to each unique patient.

History:

Pear Bio was founded in 2017 - CEO and founder, Duleek Ranatunga, had previously worked in tissue engineering, 3D printing and medical statistics during his studies thus he was exposed to the field of research and early commercial applications. The timing of founding the company was crucial, as precision medicine was just starting to become established.

Duleek Ranatunga and his nanotechnology engineer co-founder William Lin began hiring academics with backgrounds in cutting edge tissue engineering and whose expertise aided in the design and analysis of proof-of-concept experiments.

A move from the US to the Imperial College London White City Incubator followed in 2019 with Pear Bio participating in SOSV’s RebelBio accelerator programme, which is when the team started working on the idea full-time. Since then, the team has grown with the addition of more scientists specialised in fields ranging from oncology to computer vision; they have successfully tested the pipeline on 9 different cancer types by partnering up with several NHS hospitals across the UK to conduct clinical trials. They have also won several awards, including Hard Tech Investment of the Year Award (2022), and participated in several innovation-focused programmes and meetings, including the 2022 and 2023 American Association for Cancer Research (AACR) annual meetings, and SoftBank Investment Advisers’ 2021 Emerge programme.

Vision and progress:

Pear Bio’s main focus is advancing translational studies for precision medicine. As such, they have successfully raised, as of November 2023, $15 million in a Series A funding round led by Octopus Ventures. Other contributing investors include Hoxton Ventures, Compound Ventures, Crista Galli Ventures, Fly Ventures, and SOSV. With a team of 32 people, they are currently involved in four active clinical trials in the UK, and will expand their breast and kidney cancer clinical trials in the US.

Pear Bio is currently addressing the needs of patients, oncologists      and pharmaceutical companies by working on both immuno-oncology patient tests and an in-house drug discovery pipeline. By focusing on the unmet need of treating patients that are non-responsive to the currently approved therapies, Pear Bio is revolutionising the path towards future cancer drug discovery and taking initiative to develop the tailored therapeutics and precision medicines the world so urgently needs.