NEW YORK, March 18, 2025 -- DarwinHealth is proud to have been named to Fast Company's prestigious list of the World's Most Innovative Companies of 2025. This year's list shines a spotlight on businesses that are shaping research, industry, and the human condition through their unique innovations in artificial intelligence and other advances that set new standards and achieve remarkable milestones. Alongside the World's 50 Most Innovative Companies, Fast Company recognizes only the top 10 companies for each of 58 sectors. DarwinHealth was honored as one of the 10 most innovative biotech companies in the Most Innovative Companies 2025 competition.
"We deploy unique algorithmic (VIPER) and experimental (Patient-to-Model-to-Patient, PMP) technologies that can precisely identify a recurrent, druggable molecular architecture comprised of tumor checkpoints," explained DarwinHealth's CSO Mariano Alvarez who co-developed the foundational algorithm that undergirds the company's research engine. "VIPER is an algorithm based on artificial intelligence that assesses protein activity, a critical step in discovering novel cancer targets and elucidating drug mechanism-of-action."
To rank honorees from among thousands of submissions, and using the benchmarks of excellence, forward-thinking, and creativity as its vetting polestar, Fast Company's editors and writers reviewed companies driving progress around the world through a highly competitive application process. The result is a globe-spanning guide to innovation today, from early-stage startups to some of the most valuable companies in the world. On March 18, 2025, DarwinHealth joined the ranks of such biotech companies as Flagship Pioneering, Insilico Medicine, and Exscientia, previously recognized in the Fast Company competition for leveraging AI in pursuit of developing precision-based therapies for multiple disease states, including cancer.
"Our widely published innovations and clinical trials focus on the massive unmet need for cancer patients who have been unresponsive to standard-of-care, guideline-directed therapy, with the objective of extending quality survival in patients in whom other therapies have failed," explains CEO and co-founder Gideon Bosker, MD. "Because of the aforementioned innovations, which have been validated in top-tier scientific and medical journals, DarwinHealth's clinical grade technology is now being used in hundreds of cancer patients in U.S. and Europe, powering multiple clinical trials in rare and treatment-orphan malignancies, including renal, pancreatic, neuroendocrine, prostate, and brain cancer."
DarwinHealth's recognition and emergence as one of Fast Company's Most Innovative Companies (MIC) in the biotech sector is based primarily on creating innovative bioplatforms and translational through lines that merge AI/computational rigor with wet lab validations and, ultimately, peer-reviewed publications demonstrating confirmation in clinical settings. Writing in the March 18, 2025 online posting of the Fast Company MIC list, Adam Bluestein notes the 10 companies recognized in the biotech sector "are changing how we discover new drugs and treat complex diseases," adding that DarwinHealth "uses AI—its VIPER algorithm—to take experimentally measurable data from a patient's tumor, such as gene expression profiles, and make predictions about which existing drugs are most likely to be effective against the 'Tumor CheckPoint' proteins driving their particular type of cancer . . . Trial results published in 2024 showed 100% accuracy of the DarwinOncoTarget tool at predicting response to drugs called HDAC6 inhibitors in breast cancer, and a 91% accuracy of DarwinOncoTreat at predicting response of multiple tumor types."
"Along with our academic and biopharma partners, DarwinHealth is addressing the expanding unmet need for data-driven drug and target discovery using novel AI algorithms combined with experimental data and validations," explained DarwinHealth co-founder Andrea Califano, whose Lab at Columbia University developed the core technology, and who is currently President of the CHAN ZUCKERBERG BioHub (New York). "AI algorithms at DarwinHealth that rely on super-computing horsepower, reverse-engineering of regulatory networks for cancer and other disease states such as diabetes, viral infections, immune disorder, and degenerative brain disease are driving the development of novel bioplatforms with extraordinary predictive powers in the context of drug development."
"Our list of the Most Innovative Companies offers both a comprehensive look at innovation today and a playbook for the future," said Fast Company editor-in-chief Brendan Vaughan. "This year, we recognize companies that are harnessing AI in deep and meaningful ways . . . and that are introducing bold ideas . . . At a time when the world is rapidly shifting, these companies are charting the way forward."
About DarwinHealth
DarwinHealth: Precision Therapeutics for Cancer Medicine is a clinical grade, "frontiers of cancer," biotechnology-focused company, co-founded by CEO Gideon Bosker, MD, and Professor Andrea Califano, Professor of Chemical Systems Biology at Columbia University, and President, CHAN ZUCKERBERG BioHub, New York. The company's technology was developed by the Califano lab over the past 15 years and is exclusively licensed from Columbia University.
DarwinHealth utilizes proprietary, systems biology algorithms to match virtually every cancer patient with the drugs and drug combinations that are most likely to produce a successful treatment outcome. "Conversely, these same algorithms also can prioritize investigational drugs and compound combinations of unknown potential against a full spectrum of human malignancies, as well as novel cancer targets," explained Dr. Bosker, "which make them invaluable for pharmaceutical companies seeking to both optimize their compound pipelines and discover mechanistically actionable, novel cancer targets and compound-tumor alignments."
DarwinHealth's mission statement is to deploy novel technologies rooted in AI and systems biology to improve clinical outcomes of cancer treatment and other disease states. Its core technology, the VIPER algorithm, can identify tightly knit modules of master regulator proteins that represent a new class of actionable therapeutic targets in cancer. The methodology is applied along two complementary axes: First, DarwinHealth's technologies support the systematic identification and validation of druggable targets at a more foundational, deep state of the cancer cell's regulatory logic so we and our scientific partners can exploit next generation actionability based on more universal tumor dependencies and mechanisms. Second, from a drug development and discovery perspective, the same technologies are capable of identifying potentially druggable novel targets based on master regulators, and upstream modulators of those targets. This "oncotectural" approach, with its emphasis on elucidating and targeting tumor checkpoints, provides novel solutions, mechanistic validations, and positioning roadmaps for advancing precision-focused cancer drug discovery and therapeutics.
For more information, please visit: www.DarwinHealth.com.
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