CitrusX team (from website)
NovoCure, a publicly traded Israeli medtech company that develops and sells a treatment using electric fields for various types of cancer, is having difficulties forcing the firm to let go of 200 employees. Meanwhile, CitrusX, an Israeli startup that offers an end-to-end AI validation and explainability platform, raised $4.5 million in Seed funding led by Canadian VC Awz with the participation of several angel investors.
Founded in 2021 by Noa Srebrnik (CEO) and Gilad Manor (CTO) with the mission of “bringing transparency and accountability to Machine Learning (ML) models,” CitrusX is an end-to-end platform for AI transparency and explainability. “Through continuous actionable validation, governance, and monitoring, organizations can maintain confidence in their models,” boasts the firm. The holistic solution keeps all stakeholders informed for better decisions and outcomes while complying with regulations.
“In most organizations, the data scientists who built the models also test and validate them, and the rest of the business is blind to what’s happening with their machine learning,” said CEO Noa Srebnik. “By providing one unified platform for a whole company to use, CitrusX acts as the bridge that connects those mysterious ML models to the rest of the company through validation, monitoring, and reporting. Deployment and maintenance of ML models become smoother and faster, meeting regulatory demands, and helping to explain model decisions to end customers.”
Will you offer us a hand? Every gift, regardless of size, fuels our future.
Your critical contribution enables us to maintain our independence from shareholders or wealthy owners, allowing us to keep up reporting without bias. It means we can continue to make Jewish Business News available to everyone.
You can support us for as little as $1 via PayPal at office@jewishbusinessnews.com.
Thank you.
Founded in 2000, NovoCure is an oncology company working to extend survival in some of the most aggressive forms of cancer through the development and commercialization of its innovative therapy, Tumor Treating Fields. NovoCure’s commercialized products are approved in certain countries for the treatment of adult patients with glioblastoma and malignant pleural mesothelioma. Novocure has ongoing or completed clinical studies investigating Tumor Treating Fields in brain metastases, gastric cancer, glioblastoma, liver cancer, non-small cell lung cancer, pancreatic cancer and ovarian cancer.
It was just this past January that NovoCure had a success when its LUNAR study met its primary endpoint, said the company, demonstrating a “statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in overall survival over standard therapies alone.” NovoCure declared the LUNAR study to be a pivotal, open-label, randomized study evaluating the safety and efficacy of Tumor Treating Fields (TTFields) together with standard therapies for stage 4 non-small cell lung cancer (NSCLC) following progression while on or after treatment with platinum-based therapy.
The LUNAR study also showed a statistically significant and clinically meaningful improvement in overall survival when patients were treated with TTFields and immune checkpoint inhibitors (ICI), as compared to those treated with immune checkpoint inhibitors alone, and a positive trend in overall survival when patients were treated with TTFields and docetaxel versus docetaxel alone.
NovoCure is laying off 200 employees (13% of its workforce) as part of a restructuring to save $60 million in expenses.
In explaining the layoffs, NovoCure CEO Asaf Danziger said, “Decisions like these are deeply personal and challenging, because of the impact on our employees and their families. To those departing NovoCure, I want to express my sincere gratitude for your hard work. Your contributions have influenced the lives of many cancer patients and your legacy will forever be intertwined with NovoCure.”
