Lantern Pharma

Panna Sharma, the firm's President and CEO, has led Lantern since its founding in 2013. He oversees both the strategic direction of the company and the operational deployment of capital into drug candidates. Prior to Lantern, Sharma was CEO of Cancer Genetics, a genomic diagnostics firm, and has a long track record in data-driven oncology. His dual background in AI and biotech shapes the firm's clinical prioritization decisions.

Lantern acquires licenses to existing compounds rather than discovering new molecules, focusing on assets that have shown efficacy signals in earlier trials but failed to advance due to an inability to identify the right patient subtype. The RADR platform screens over 20 billion data points, including gene expression profiles and drug sensitivity data, to find biomarker-patient matches that the original developers overlooked. License deals are typically structured with milestone and royalty obligations rather than large upfront payments.

Lantern Pharma is an operating company listed on the Nasdaq under the ticker LTRN. It is not a family office, venture fund, or RIA — it is a clinical-stage oncology firm that deploys its own balance sheet to advance a therapeutic pipeline. Investors participate by purchasing equity on the public market, not as limited partners.

Confirmed clinical programs include LP-184, a synthetic-lethal compound being studied in glioblastoma and other solid tumors with DNA damage response deficiencies, and LP-300, a combination therapy for never-smoker non-small cell lung cancer. A third candidate, LP-284, received FDA IND clearance in September 2023 for hematologic cancers. All are guided by RADR-generated biomarker hypotheses rather than traditional Phase I escalation models.

No philanthropic foundation or donor-advised fund has been publicly linked to Lantern Pharma's corporate structure. The firm's clinical work generates open-access datasets in certain cases, but it does not operate a separate philanthropic arm or family-office-style giving vehicle.

Lantern runs clinical trials in collaboration with oncology centers in the United States and South Korea, but does not operate a co-investment club or institutional LP structure of the kind seen at venture-backed biotech firms. Its research collaborations function as fee-for-service or data-sharing agreements rather than shared-risk investment vehicles.

The RADR platform works by analyzing gene-expression, protein-interaction, and drug-sensitivity data to predict which cancer subpopulations will respond to a given compound before a trial begins. This allows the firm to run smaller, faster Phase II trials that enroll only predicted responders rather than requiring hundreds of patients to achieve statistical significance. The company achieved two FDA Fast Track designations using this approach.