Waypoint Bio

Waypoint Bio is a New York City-based biotechnology company that combines artificial intelligence, computer vision, and pooled screening with spatial biology to design and optimize cell therapies. Its platform performs deep phenotyping across thousands of cell therapy designs, measuring hundreds of phenotypes at single-cell resolution and rank-ordering candidate designs, with the stated aim of compressing work that would traditionally take years into a single experiment. The company's therapeutic focus is solid tumors, an indication area it describes as lacking cell therapy options for roughly 90% of cancer patients, alongside autoimmune diseases.

The core technical approach is in vivo spatial pooled screening: in situ genotyping is paired with multi-color spatial biology imaging (subcellular-resolution imaging of whole tumor sections with more than 25-plex cell staining) so that thousands of perturbations can be tested in vivo simultaneously, generating many readouts per design rather than the one-dimensional readouts of conventional pooled screens or the low throughput of one-by-one screens. Proprietary machine learning, including a model the company calls Wayfinder LLM, learns from in-house screens, collaborations, literature, and clinical samples to propose new designs in an iterative design-test-learn loop covering CAR-T constructs and in vivo delivery vectors.

Pipeline programs disclosed in funding coverage include WAY-103, the lead program, and WAY-200 for colorectal cancer. The lead asset is described as an in vivo CAR T paired with a proprietary next-generation lentiviral vector, with clinical entry in China expected in late 2026.