Elephas is a biotechnology company founded in 2020 and headquartered in Madison, Wisconsin. It develops precision oncology tools built around a live tumor profiling platform designed to give clinicians real-time functional insight into how an individual patient's tumor responds to immunotherapy. The company has raised more than $169 million in capital.
Its product, elive™, preserves live tumour tissue taken from standard core needle biopsies and maintains the native tumour microenvironment. This allows the immune response to be characterised against a range of therapeutic agents before treatment starts, rather than relying on static genomic or histological snapshots. The work sits at the intersection of several technical fields: live tumour profiling, functional precision medicine, cancer diagnostics and the identification of predictive biomarkers for immunotherapy response.
The platform addresses a well-documented clinical problem: only one in five patients who receive immunotherapy respond to it. In addition to serving medical oncologists and research scientists, Elephas works with pharmaceutical research and development teams, aiming to de-risk pipeline decisions and improve clinical trial design. The platform is engineered for deployment in pathology laboratories globally, and the company's stated mission is to improve outcomes for cancer patients.
