NVision founders Ilai Schwartz (left) and Sella Brosh
NVision
NVision raises $38 million led by health diagnostics giant Abbott to scale up its groundbreaking cancer imaging system. Next up: using its quantum technology to design new drugs.
On a sunny Tuesday in late March at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center in New York City, Kayvan Keshari pulls up images of a patient’s prostate tumor on his computer. This is no traditional MRI scan. Instead, it looks more like a weather map that shows how the tumor is changing, with areas of serious disease glowing red and ominous black.
“The areas that are black are what will kill you. The green is indolent and people will even argue, ‘This is not a cancer you should treat,’” says Keshari, a researcher who focuses on cancer metabolism and has worked to bring this new imaging technology to MSK. “We can’t just understand one tumor or one blood sample. We have to understand the tumor’s ecosystem, and you can’t do that without imaging.”
The problem is that standard MRIs only show broad outlines of the disease. And even PET scans, which rely on radioactive tracers, show how a tumor has grown but not the full biological activity happening inside it.
Enter NVision Quantum Technologies. The 11-year-old, Ulm, Germany-based company has developed a new way to image cancer cells by taking advantage of the fact that they process sugar differently from healthy cells. Their quantum-based technology can boost the signal sugars emit by more than 10,000 times, which enables a standard MRI machine to measure how a tumor’s cells are changing in real time.
That will allow oncologists and the cancer patients they’re treating to get feedback on whether a therapy is working in days instead of months. It is currently only for research, but a commercial version could be life-changing for patients who have limited time to find the right treatment before their cancer progresses.
“We know that metabolism is the first thing to change when treatment is working,” says NVision cofounder and CEO Sella Brosh. “The MRI is a machine that we are leveraging. We are just adding the metabolic layer to the existing scan.”
NVision said on Wednesday that it had raised $55 million in new funding, including $38 million led by medical diagnostics giant Abbott (market cap: $146 billion), which has recently been doubling down on early cancer diagnosis. (The rest of the funding is in the form of a $17 million venture loan from the European Investment Bank.) The new funding, which brings its total equity investment to $74 million, values the firm at more than $250 million.
“We know that metabolism is the first thing to change when a treatment is working.”
In the scheme of multi-billion-dollar valuations for AI startups, that’s small, and NVision’s business remains in its early days. But since first deploying at MSK last summer, it is starting to roll out its metabolic imaging at top hospitals and bring in revenue. Brosh expects to be in 20 centers across the U.S., Europe and Asia by the end of the year, including Houston’s MD Anderson, UCSF and the University of Cambridge. NVision is now talking with the FDA and other regulators around the world, and Brosh expects to be ready for human clinical studies in 2027.
“This is a molecular telescope that allows us to do things that had previously been impossible to do,” says Peter Barrett, a general partner at Playground Global, who first invested in NVision nearly nine years ago. “A lot of things that ail us also affect metabolism in ways that are smoking guns.”
But NVision has even bigger ambitions than its metabolic MRI. It is also harnessing the emerging field of quantum computing, which uses the study of physics at small scales—known as quantum mechanics—to solve problems beyond the ability of supercomputers. NVision’s quantum work stems from a breakthrough its researchers made with organic molecules they’d originally hoped to use for the quantum-based imaging system. Instead, they figured out a way to build quantum computers with standard semiconductor manufacturing technology. “Now they have something that most labs and academics have talked about, but don’t have a demo to point to,” says Prineha Narang, a physicist and professor at UCLA who recently joined NVision’s scientific advisory board.
With this breakthrough and the new cash, NVision is broadening its focus, expanding from imaging and clinical work to drug development. Brosh sees potential to use quantum computing to design potential therapies for previously “undruggable” targets, then test those with its metabolic imaging. The goal is to shorten the time and expense it takes to get a would-be drug into late-stage clinical trials in humans. “We will use this with patients, but we see this as an important tool to validate the efficacy of drugs,” Brosh says.
“This is a molecular telescope that allows us to do things that had previously been impossible to do.”
Brosh, 46, an Israel-born physician, was working at McKinsey’s Tel Aviv office when he met cofounder Ilai Schwartz, 42, who did his PhD in physics at the University of Ulm. Over beers one evening, Schwartz told Brosh how you can take sugar molecules and magnetize them to make their MRI signals stronger. “Both of us got really excited about this idea,” Brosh says.
It’s not a new concept, but the technological challenges were daunting. GE had introduced an early metabolic scanning system in 2014, but it could only function at about negative 460 degrees Fahrenheit, making its use cumbersome and expensive. Schwartz thought they could use quantum technology to create a metabolic imaging system that could operate at room temperature. “The idea was, ‘We will solve the engineering complexity,’” Brosh says.
In late 2013, Schwartz quit his consulting gig and returned to Ulm, where he collaborated with physicists at the university there. Two years later, with initial funding from the European Commission and a proof of concept, he asked Brosh to join the effort. They spun NVision out of the school with three top academic physicists as cofounders in 2015.
Their original research focused on using defects in diamonds to reveal magnetic fluctuations, but they soon realized it wouldn’t scale as a business, Schwartz says. Then they tried organic molecules, which also didn’t work for what they wanted but ultimately led to the breakthrough for their newer quantum computing business. Eventually, they came up with their current technology, which relies on a form of quantum-engineered hydrogen gas. “If we weren’t patient with the physics, they would have run out of money twice years ago,” investor Barrett says.
Brosh sees potential not only in determining what drugs are working, but in making better decisions about who needs treatment. With prostate cancer, for example, low-grade tumors call for just watching and waiting, but some patients who are sent home with that advice turn out to have an aggressive cancer that needs immediate intervention. The company also believes that its scans could prove useful not just for cancer, but for cardiology, neurology and other disease areas, by revealing previously hidden metabolic changes.
“We are measuring tumors with rulers, yet we drive electric cars and have rocket ships that go to Mars,” says MSK’s Keshari. “We have the opportunity to change that.”
MORE FROM FORBES