Noetik combines multiplexed in-vivo mouse perturbations (Perturb-Map) with a human-only-trained foundation model (TARIO-2) to produce human-space tumor readouts from animal data.
Key Takeaways
Perturb-Map runs hundreds of CRISPR knockouts simultaneously in one mouse using Pro-Code barcodes, cutting cost and inter-animal variability vs. single-knockout cohort designs.
TARIO-2, trained exclusively on human cancer H&E, generalizes zero-shot to mouse tumor histology, predicting human spatial gene expression without retraining.
The combined system (Perturb-MARS) outputs human-gene-space readouts, including genes like CEACAM6 that have no mouse ortholog, grounding animal causal data in human biology.
Spatial resolution is preserved unlike Perturb-Seq, which requires tissue dissociation and destroys tumor microenvironment structure.
Claimed use case: answering combination therapy questions (e.g., next PD-1 bispecific target after VEGF) that standard preclinical apparatus cannot address.
