Altis Labs, an AI software company for drug development, has raised $25 million in Series A funding, CEO Felix Baldauf-Lenschen announced. The company focuses on clinical trial endpoints. AI technology has demonstrated greater advancement in identifying drug candidates than in validating their effectiveness in patients. This creates opportunities for tools that could accelerate clinical development processes. The funding round highlights growing investor interest in AI applications that address later stages of drug development, particularly in streamlining clinical trials.

INOVAIT announces recipients of the 2025/26 INOVAIT Awards, Canadian health innovation ecosystem Awards. OTTAWA, Ontario - (BUSINESS WIRE) - INOVAIT, Canada's image-guided therapy and artificial intelligence network, presented the 2025/26 INOVAIT Awards at its annual meeting in Ottawa yesterday (February 10, 2026). The INOVAIT Awards recognize industry and academic members of the INOVAIT Network who are developing breakthrough innovations in healthcare and spearheading economic development for Canada. "Through the INOVAIT Awards, we are spotlighting those who are not only advancing breakthrough medical technologies, but also strengthening Canada's health innovation ecosystem," said Kullervo Hynynen, Co-Executive Director of INOVAIT. "The 2025/26 award recipients exemplify the leadership, rigour, and real-world impact that define Canadian medtech." The 2025/26 INOVAIT Awards were granted to the following recipients: Altis Labs received the 2025/26 Maple Leaf Award. The Maple Leaf Award recognizes an industry member who has strengthened working relationships and partnerships with other companies and institutions across Canada. Altis Labs has three INOVAIT R&D projects that have established research collaborations with BC Cancer, Alberta Health Services, Hamilton Health Sciences, Sunnybrook Research Institute, Trillium Health Partners, the University Health Network, and the University of Calgary. Altis brings together Canada's unique AI talent and clinical research excellence to develop prognostic imaging AI models that accelerate drug development. "INOVAIT's support has been vital in bridging the gap between AI research and commercialization," says Duoaud Shah, Head of Clinical Partnerships at Altis Labs. "Together with our pan-Canadian partners, we are ensuring Canadian innovation leads the global advancement of medicine." Nova Scotia Health received the 2025/26 Aurora Borealis Award. The Aurora Borealis Award celebrates academic institutions and their administrative teams who foster synergetic relationships between industry and academia to drive healthcare innovation. Over the last five years, Nova Scotia Health has partnered on five pan-Canadian R&D projects. Nova Scotia Health also enabled the second Medventions site across Canada, and this year supported the launch of Medventions Atlantic NL in Newfoundland & Labrador. Nova Scotia Health actively champions innovation opportunities and enables the next generation of innovators in Eastern Canada to acquire the skills they need to succeed in medtech. "We're honoured to receive the Aurora Borealis Award from INOVAIT, said Margaret Palmeter, Senior Director of Innovation at Nova Scotia Health. "This recognition reflects the dedication of our teams and partners who work every day to move innovation from idea to impact - quickly, thoughtfully, and in ways that truly support patient care and system needs. At Nova Scotia Health, we're committed to creating the conditions for meaningful collaboration and accelerating projects that improve health outcomes for Nova Scotians." Profound Medical received the 2025/26 Mount Logan Award. This award acknowledges the INOVAIT member who has achieved their project milestones and reached new heights for their company, demonstrating Canada's greatness on the world stage. Profound Medical has achieved significant milestones and international acclaim over the last year, including treating their 4,000th TULSA-PRO patient, securing new U.S. reimbursement codes from Medicare, and establishing strategic partnerships to expand patient access globally. "We are incredibly honoured to receive this award and sincerely thank INOVAIT for supporting AI development of TULSA-PRO as we work to drive widespread global commercialization of this home-grown Canadian medical innovation," said Arun Menawat, Profound Medical's CEO and Chairman. "Toronto's renowned Sunnybrook Health Sciences Centre was the original innovator of the TULSA-PRO technology, and to date, more than 4,000 men around the world have undergone the TULSA Procedure for prostate cancer and/or BPH." Through the INOVAIT Awards, the network continues to amplify the Canadian medtech companies and healthcare institutions that are transforming patient care and advancing medical innovation globally. INOVAIT is supported by the Government of Canada through the Strategic Response Fund.

Revolutionizing the technology behind drug development. Felix Baldauf-Lenschen '14 launched a company devoted to accelerating development of new and effective cancer drugs. The next time you talk to someone who becomes an excitable student of life when a favorite passion is brought up, look in their eyes. The eyes say it all. In a conversation with Felix Baldauf-Lenschen '14, his eyes light up when he discusses AI-enabled medical imaging, which has become the cornerstone innovation for his startup, Altis Labs, a biotechnology company based in Toronto, Ontario. "The earlier you can find out how well a drug is working, the quicker you can get to the next stage of its development," Baldauf-Lenschen said in an interview at his office in the heart of Toronto's MaRS Centre innovation hub. Altis creates software for images taken during a drug's clinical trial so it can optimize them to speed up what researchers need to know: Is the drug helping, or not, to, say, help patients live longer? His eyes dance again when he talks about why he's neck-deep in a sector the economics major never thought he'd dive into. The earlier you know that a drug actually can work, the faster you can get to that phase-three step it needs. "And that means more time on patent, more revenue, more lives saved, more lives prolonged," he said. Known for having one of the world's largest cancer-imaging databases, Altis Labs developed an AI model that analyzes CT scans by quantifying tumors, muscle, fat, and the cardiovascular health of the patient. The system forecasts a score, which ultimately becomes survival-prediction for that patient based on that scan. As clinical trial patients undergo multiple scans during treatment, their score might increase, suggesting treatment response, or decrease, suggesting deterioration. The company primarily focuses on drugs treating lung, breast, prostate, and colorectal cancers. During drug trials on cancer patients, radiologists follow criteria established 25 years ago to make measurements that attempt to anticipate whether the drugs will work, but they can often disagree about the data. With AI technology, there is less opinion and more hard data to predict, for example, if a drug is affecting tumors in some way. "An X-ray is only a 2D image of many vital organs of the chest, so there can be very nuanced findings that on one day a radiologist might see or suspect something, and on another day they might not," Baldauf-Lenschen said. The startup's client list is a who's who of Big Pharma: Johnson & Johnson, AstraZeneca, Bayer, and Debiopharm. In June 2023, four years after it launched, Altis Labs secured $6 million in seed funding. "What really gets me excited about Altis Labs is understanding how to bring down the cost for a company to introduce a new drug to market, which should help everyone," Baldauf-Lenschen said. "And we can even help drug companies fail faster, because the quicker they know their drug isn't working, the faster they can start trials with another drug. That could bring down drug prices, too." He's got a point: Up to 90 percent of all drug trials fail, according to a 2022 paper. Meeting clients in Toronto and on Zoom to talk about medical imaging is a far cry from the life Baldauf-Lenschen, who was born in Germany and raised in Zurich, led years ago, when he dreamed of skiing for a living. Soccer and skiing had long been family pastimes, and Colby caught his eye thanks to its success in skiing, and he thought he could also walk onto the soccer team. "To be part of a small community where athletics was central, that was appealing to me," he recalled. When he arrived on Mayflower Hill, he soon realized skiing was out of the question. "These skiers were very serious, and I couldn't commit in that way," he said, adding that a few injuries also set back his midfielder ambitions. He majored in economics, and Colby's interdisciplinary approach meshed well with his wide-ranging interests. "What I loved about Colby is the opportunity to take classes across so many disciplines," Baldauf-Lenschen said, "from philosophy to music to dance. And back then, no, I never thought I'd start my own company in the medical field." Soon after graduating, he moved to Boston to work as a financial analyst for a company advising commercial banks, delving into predicting the default rate companies might see in their portfolios. The investment firm Cambridge Associates pulled him away from Boston to San Francisco, and he recalled attending many fascinating conferences with healthcare companies focused on digital innovation. A high school classmate from his Zurich days had a neighbor on the board of a medical imaging company that used AI technology to help radiologists be more efficient in diagnosing patients and reviewing scans. When that board member, Sally Daub, stepped in as CEO of Enlitic, she brought on Baldauf-Lenschen as vice president of business development. "That was really exciting to me, to be part of that cutting edge of AI research," he said, eyes aglow again. "We were working on AI models that were detecting lung cancer a year or two prior to a radiologist being able to do the same." Being immersed in radiology gave him an idea. Radiology yields the most comprehensive data in healthcare, but that data was poorly used to predict survival differences, he said. He wondered: Is there a better way to understand how well new drugs are working? In 2019, he cofounded Altis with Daub and moved to Toronto, a city known for its startup community and for nurturing AI talent while also boasting a single-payer healthcare system that centralizes historical imaging data - something that is widely fragmented in the United States. Canadians' easy access to healthcare created a pipeline to fuel Altis Lab's value proposition. When the company analyzes CT scans during drug trials, it outputs IPRO (Imaging-Based Prognostication) scores, which predict if a certain treatment is effective. These scores can inform drug companies whether to progress or stop development of a new treatment that has yet to reach Federal Drug Administration approval. A major test of Altis Labs' promise came when a global pharmaceutical company invited the lab to analyze the efficacy of its new drug approved by the FDA. The company asked back-test Altis' AI model, meaning it re-analyzed the clinical trial using IPRO scores. "We got five million images, did the test within a weekend, and later got a call from the company saying how well we performed and asking if we could begin working on additional cancer drugs they were trialling," Baldauf-Lenschen said. The lab has scanned medical images and found a drug prolonged survival 10 months earlier than traditional radiological interpretation. It's that kind of rich data, delivered at a fraction of the time of manual analysis, that is so attractive to drug companies, he said. Down the road, if IPRO is accepted by regulators, drug developers would be able to get accelerated drug approval months earlier using the lab's software. This space is growing quickly: Cancer medicine spending at list prices surged to $252 billion globally in 2024 and is expected to reach $441 billion by 2029. It's appealing to Baldauf-Lenschen that he can be part of a cresting wave of health-tech breakthroughs, while also learning on the job. "I love how I get to work with our engineering and product teams and recognize how much we have to do to have a model trained with so much data, to have these massive historical data sets," he said. Even their company name is proof of its direction. "In Latin, altis means high or deep, depending on the context, and since we use deep-learning in our AI systems, well, it just felt right," he said with a wide smile and beaming eyes. "And I wanted something short and easy to pronounce."