AI-powered clinical trial design company QuantHealth raises $17M
With this investment, QuantHealth has joined Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight
Today, over 90% of experimental therapies that reach human trials fail to make it to market, costing the industry $45 billion annually. These failures are primarily due to lack of efficacy and safety and the result of protocol design processes that are driven by intuition, current knowledge, and historical data.
"Some drugs shouldn't go to trial, while many that do are suboptimally designed. All this is causing trials to become increasingly longer, more expensive, and less effective while patients aren't getting the drugs they need," Orr Inbar, co-founder and CEO of QuantHealth, an AI-powered clinical trial design company that simulates clinical trials in the cloud, told VatorNews.
"With recent advances in data and AI, it has become clear that we can begin to close that gap with the help of technology."
QuantHealth, which allows pharmaceutical and biotech companies to more quickly and cost-effectively develop treatments for patients, announced on Monday that it has raised $17 million in a Series A funding round co-led by Accenture Ventures and a "major CRO," bringing its total funding to $22 million.
With this investment, QuantHealth has joined Project Spotlight, an engagement and investment program from Accenture Ventures, in which it works with companies that create or apply disruptive enterprise technologies. This will provide QuantHealth with access to Accenture’s domain expertise and its enterprise clients.
"Accenture is a healthcare powerhouse, with expertise spanning business, clinical, and technological aspects of drug development, with strong partnerships and relationships spanning virtually the entire pharma industry. They are an ideal partner for QuantHealth, as they can provide invaluable strategic advice and direction, as well as operational firepower and business channels," said Inbar.
"QuantHealth is proud to have some of healthcare’s biggest names on board, supporting its journey towards a faster, cheaper, and more effective drug development platform."
Founded in 2020, the Tel Aviv-based QuantHealth's AI solution is based on the integration of a large real-world dataset of over 350 million patients with a biomedical knowledge-graph of over 700,000 biomedical entities and therapeutics. This integration allows for granular and comprehensive simulations, which is already applied by various pharma customers in the US and EU.
The platform is typically used by pharmaceutical and biotech companies, including IQVIA, Boston Pharmaceuticals, Sanofi, Morphosys, and 4P Pharma, to save money on clinical trials and drug development. It can predict trial outcomes with 86% accuracy by testing thousands of protocol variations and discovering the optimal trial design for success, helping R&D teams more accurately and rapidly develop and optimize trial protocols.
"QuantHealth has taken it upon ourselves to be a leader in the field of biosimulation, in-silico trials, and synthetic evidence generation - working with the pharmaceutical industry, academia, and regulators, hand in hand, to develop transformative AI solutions that dramatically increase the probability of success," said Inbar.
In a recent case study, Quanthealth helped a sponsor design their phase-2 trial in acute respiratory distress syndrome. By simulating thousands of protocol variations, it was able to make minor amendments to their protocol that had increased the target population by 4.5x, reducing study duration by 11 months, reducing the number of participants required by 251, all while improving the likelihood of success of the primary endpoint by 16.5%.
QuantHealth will use the new funding to enhance its platform and to continue its expansion in the US and globally.
Ultimately, the company's aim is to help the healthcare industry unlock data-driven excellence in clinical trial development, Inbar explained.
"This is why, despite being an AI-native technology company, our founding team and advisory board include physicians, scientists, and healthcare experts. We started out supporting clinical development teams with our flagship trial design solution, but are now working on expanding our platform both upstream, to support preclinical and drug discovery functions, as well downstream, to support clinical operations and commercial functions," he said.
"With this path towards a vertically integrated platform, we strive to be the premier clinical operating system for pharma companies."
