Xilis develops the MicroOrganoSphere™ (MOS™) technology, a scalable, high-throughput patient-derived model that recapitulates tumor microenvironment and immune interactions for precision oncology and drug discovery. The MOS platform is designed to guide clinicians in treatment decisions and to accelerate biopharma R&D and drug development. Xilis is building AI-driven algorithms, including a Xilis Response Score™, to enable timely, informed treatment selection in the clinic. The company says MOS is the first end-to-end platform capable of capturing tumor heterogeneity at scale and enabling next-generation immuno-oncology and cell therapy discovery. Xilis will use the Series A proceeds to advance and expand its proprietary MOS platform across clinical diagnostics and partnered drug discovery efforts. The company is based in Durham, North Carolina, and has recently participated in the Oncode-PACT Consortium and was featured as the cover article in Cell Stem Cell. Xilis’s core product is the MicroOrganoSphere (MOS) technology: miniature patient-derived tumor models that capture tumor heterogeneity and the native microenvironment. Using MOS plus AI-driven algorithms, Xilis is developing a Precision Oncology Platform and a Xilis Response Score to help clinicians prioritize therapies, with a turnaround from biopsy to results in under two weeks. The MOS platform also targets pharmaceutical applications across discovery, preclinical toxicity and efficacy testing, bioanalytical assays, and clinical trial support, including immunotherapy development that requires intact immune microenvironments. Xilis plans to expand its AI capabilities, advance diagnostic clinical studies, and validate MOS use with biopharma partners. The company emphasizes an automated, scalable solution to speed patient-specific therapeutic profiling and drug development. Xilis has developed a microfluidics-based process that cultivates and sustains thousands of micro-tumors from a single patient biopsy to test which cancer treatments will or won’t work. The founders, Duke University researchers Xiling Shen and Dr. David Hsu, advanced work based on Hans Clevers’s organoid research; Clevers has joined as a co-founder. The company reports creating 10,000 micro-tumors from a single biopsy and says its technology is already in clinical trials with data showing it can predict treatment success and find therapies for drug-resistant patients. Xilis is also building a micro-organoid bank that it expects pharma companies will use for large-scale drug screening. To accelerate commercialization and shorten time-to-clinic, Xilis has raised external capital and is positioning the platform as a lower-cost, higher-throughput alternative for early drug testing. The company emphasizes both near-term clinical decision support and longer-term value from the datasets it is assembling.

Total raised

$92M

Funding rounds

3

Latest round

Series A

Latest activity

Jul 2022