Paige raises $15 million from Goldman Sachs to detect cancer with computer vision

Health care startup Paige has raised an additional $15 million from Goldman Sachs to help diagnose cancer using computer vision trained on clinical imaging data. The funding shows that while COVID-19 investments are getting a lot of attention, AI-related efforts to fight cancer are also moving forward.

The idea is to use data sets related to treatment and genomics to train deep learning networks to detect breast, prostate, and other major cancers. Paige builds computational pathology products to help pathologists deliver more accurate diagnoses to cancer patients and allow patients and their care teams to make faster, more informed treatment decisions.

New York-based Paige has raised over $95 million to date. The latest money came from Goldman Sachs Merchant Banking Division, while Healthcare Venture Partners added $5 million to a previous investment. The funding brings Paige’s series B, originally disclosed in December, to $70 million. Paige recently added David Castelblanco, managing director at Goldman Sachs, to its board.

“We really have an opportunity to accelerate our product development across multiple different tissue types, multiple different cancer types,” said Paige CEO Leo Grady in an interview with VentureBeat. “And we are seeing a strong interest from the biopharma industry and working together with them on a number of deals that are not public. With some of the big pharma companies, we’re able to lean into those more and make some additional investment.”

Paige will use the new capital to develop its custom diagnostic and test products for the biopharma industry while strengthening its position in clinical AI for pathologists. It is also developing the Paige platform for remote viewing and routine clinical practice.

“Another element has to do with COVID-19,” Grady said. “Most of us have had the opportunity to be able to work from home during this crisis, and to be able to connect with video conference and calls and continue to do our work. But that hasn’t been true for pathologists, who are still primarily using microscopes to look at tissue and to be able to make the diagnosis. And so there is an increased demand and an increased interest in going digital, and being able to work remotely and continue their work. We can invest in this further.”

Above: Paige’s team in New York.

Image Credit: Paige

Paige also has a partnership with Konica Minolta company Invicro to provide integrated pathology solutions to support pharmaceutical and biotechnology sponsors with their drug discovery and development initiatives.

Paige was founded in 2017 by Thomas Fuchs and his colleagues from the Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center. The company has about 50 employees and is hiring for a number of positions.

“We’ve been growing rapidly. And we are actively hiring across a whole range of different roles, both on the engineering and product development by AI scientists, data scientists,” Grady said. “We are also hiring around the country and internationally.”

Paige has been granted FDA breakthrough designation for computational pathology products, which could help it get approval for its products faster.