University of Arizona startup ProxyBio raises 3.5M to scale AI-powered organoid platform for cancer drug response

ProxyBio, a University of Arizona startup developing patient-derived organoid technology paired with its CLARITYAI platform to predict cancer drug response, has received a $3.5 million investment from GKCC to advance its commercial product suite.

Straight from the labs of the BIO5 Institute, the Department of Cellular & Molecular Medicine in the College of Medicine - Tucson, and the UA Cancer Center, ProxyBio launched in 2025 to improve the lives of cancer patients through AI-enabled, individualized prediction models for drug response, improved pharmaceutical trials, and reduced reliance on animal models. The company’s CLARITYAI platform powers a three-product suite – ProxyDISCOVERY for pharma drug screening, ProxyTOX for preclinical safety assessment, and ProxyPATIENT for companion-diagnostic-style patient profiling – collectively aiming to reshape cancer care.

The university facilitated the company’s formation and launch through Tech Launch Arizona (TLA), the office that commercializes innovations stemming from U of A research and innovation. TLA provided a multitude of services to help the team, including intellectual property protection, market research, leadership team coaching and mentoring, and customer discovery and market validation through the NSF I-Corps program. 

“Despite remarkable advances in drug discovery, many promising therapeutics fail during human clinical trials because traditional preclinical models often do not accurately replicate the complexity of human biology and disease” said Bruce Burgess, director of venture development for TLA.  “ProxyBio offers a transformative approach by more faithfully modeling human tissues and cellular interactions, enabling researchers to identify more effective and safer therapies earlier in the development process. By improving predictive accuracy before clinical testing, ProxyBio can accelerate drug development while significantly reducing costs and failure rates.”

The startup’s vision led to this significant investment to further expand the research and innovation developed by its three founders: Curtis Thorne, Associate Professor of Cellular & Molecular Medicine and Chief Executive Officer; Kelvin W. Pond, Assistant Professor and Chief Science Officer; and Robert Carnahan, Professor at Vanderbilt University and Chief Operations Officer. 

ProxyBio’s technology uses living organoids, which are miniature, patient-derived tumor models, to test how cancer cells and surrounding healthy tissue will respond to different drugs. This “living diagnostic” stands in contrast to traditional methods that destroy biopsy samples and offer limited insight into treatment effectiveness.

“Cancer is not one disease. It is thousands of unique diseases shaped by each patient, each tissue, and each cell,” Pond said. “ProxyBio’s platform is built for that reality. By combining patient-derived organoids, high-content imaging, and AI, we can measure how a living tumor responds to therapy at extraordinary depth. This will help clinicians make more informed treatment decisions while also giving drug developers higher-resolution tools to design more directed and successful clinical trials.”

According to Thorne, the process allows doctors and scientists to better understand how an individual patient’s tumor and body will respond to a proposed treatment. “We're literally measuring every cell of the tumor and how every cell responds to drug treatment ... in its natural environment of the other cells that would be around it, which is important,” he said. “A cell’s neighborhood makes a difference in how it behaves ... All that cell-to-cell signaling affects the response to therapy … It’s sort of like running many clinical trials in parallel for a patient in a dish.”

Thorne says that the ProxyBio screening process, which originally took six months, has been slashed to only six weeks. Lots of factors have led to this time reduction. “We can grow them faster, smaller and with more automation,” he said. The team’s goal is to reduce this time to one week with the new investment. Faster turnaround times are critical as early‑onset colorectal cancer – a primary focus of the team – continues to rise and clinicians seek more precise tools to guide treatment.

The company is also developing an organoid biobank to support drug discovery and reduce reliance on animal models, which often fail to accurately predict human responses. The team aims to grow this biobank to 1,000 organoids, enabling more ethical and effective pharmaceutical testing. 

As it is seeking FDA approval, ProxyBio’s ProxyPATIENT offering is currently for research use only and is only accessible to select patients and clinicians. However, with rapidly improving technology and a $3.5 million investment to accelerate their progress, Thorne and the team are moving as quickly as possible to bring their technology to doctors and their patients.