LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman was a billionaire when Microsoft purchased LinkedIn in 2016 for $26.2 billion in money, and he has additionally made his fortune on high-return investments in additional than 80 tech startups, together with Airbnb, Groupon, and Flickr. He famously made $111 million from his preliminary $37,500 funding in Fb.
Now Hoffman is popping his consideration to AI in healthcare with a brand new startup he offered ultimate week with co-founder Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee: Manas AI. And this time Hoffman has deeper hopes than only a excessive go back on funding — he needs to lend a hand remedy most cancers.
Manas is bringing AI to probably the most global’s most sensible drug building scientists to deepen their experience and accelerate the velocity at which new medication are found out. The startup objectives to unite researchers with complicated AI methods to extra temporarily determine how doubtlessly life-saving medication may just have interaction with the human frame.
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Manas is to start with turning its consideration to competitive cancers like breast most cancers, prostate most cancers, and lymphoma. Its long-term imaginative and prescient is to basically exchange how the trade discovers and develops new drugs.
“The general public have had buddies, members of the family, and many others., who have died from most cancers or had severe most cancers issues,” Hoffman instructed CNBC on Monday. “If we will be able to make an enormous distinction in this, and that is the type of factor that AI could make an enormous distinction in, it is the type of reason AI may also be nice for humanity.”
Reid Hoffman The Halfway SF on December 05, 2023, in San Francisco, California. Photograph through Kimberly White/Getty Photographs for WIRED
The startup has raised $24.6 million in seed investment up to now, with Hoffman main the investment spherical with project capital company Normal Catalyst. It is going to perform its AI methods in knowledge facilities owned through Microsoft.
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Mukherjee is a Columbia College professor and creator of “The Emperor of All Maladies,” a ebook about most cancers. In 2016, he helped discovered Vor BioPharma, a mobile engineering corporate, and in 2021 he based Myeloid Therapeutics, a most cancers remedy startup.
Manas lately has 4 staff together with Mukherjee and Hoffman, with Hoffman announcing he serves as the corporate’s “AI man” and Mukherjee because the “bio man.” Manas’ objective is to unite the 2 fields.
“It’s not simply the most efficient of science and it’s not simply the most efficient of AI, as a result of both of the ones two (is) inadequate,” Hoffman instructed CNBC. “You want to position the ones two in combination.”
The AI healthcare sector noticed considerable investments in 2024. Consistent with PitchBook, traders poured $10.5 billion into 511 healthcare AI offers in 2024. Most cancers screening AI startup Freenome raised essentially the most cash out of the gang with a $254 million Sequence F in February 2024.
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