Blank Bio releases Ladon, a 3-billion-parameter RNA foundation model that predicts immunotherapy response in six held-out trials
Blank Bio has released Ladon, a 3-billion-parameter transcriptomic foundation model pretrained with a self-supervised objective on millions of RNA-seq samples to predict patient prognosis and therapeutic response from pre-treatment expression data. Across six held-out clinical trials in bladder, kidney, lung and liver cancer, Ladon significantly outperformed all baselines for immunotherapy response prediction, including PD-L1 expression; a score built for the POPLAR trial behaved as a predictive rather than merely prognostic biomarker.