AI-powered clinical research platform Manifold raises $15 million

The company eliminates the administrative burden for cancer centers and academic medical centers

Today, clinical research has many manual processes and legacy tools, where the collection, management, and analysis of data for clinical research happens in tools like Excel spreadsheets, SAS, and REDCap. However, these technologies weren’t designed for a world with the current amount of health data, including electronic medical records, genomic, imaging, patient reported outcomes, and wearables, that's available. 

"Often, data is stored as copies across shared servers or digital silos, making it difficult for researchers to access and analyze data. To answer even simply stated research questions, an analyst often has to do a months-long project tracking down the right data and stitching it together in the right way. Sometimes, this is literally manually searching through thousands of rows in Excel sheets," said Vivek Mohta, President and co-founder of AI-powered clinical research platform Manifold, which announced a $15 million Series A on Thursday.

'Refreshing the dataset with the latest patient information also requires a 20-step process and significant effort from analysts. And to collaborate across institutions, analysts must email encrypted data back and forth, then ensure the data is managed securely before, during, and after the project."

All of this has the effect of bogging down researchers with administrative processes, limiting research output and scientific progress, and slowing patients’ access to potentially lifesaving treatments. 

Manifold's solution to the problem is to provide a platform that allows research teams to enroll and engage study participants, harmonize and curate longitudinal data, manage and analyze multimodal datasets, and collaborate securely with researchers at other organizations.

"We eliminate the administrative burden from clinical research, automating tedious workflows and transformation of disparate multimodal data, all in one end-to-end platform. With Manifold, researchers at all levels can perform at the top of their license, spending more time on the pressing questions that will lead to better patient outcomes," Mohta explained.

The company partners with clinical research leaders in cancer centers and academic medical centers, who use its technology to streamline manual workflows in study operations and data operations, increase scientific output, and simplify collaborations with other organizations. 

For example, at Indiana University Melvin and Bren Simon Comprehensive Cancer Center, the Biobank Core is using Manifold to reduce the turnaround time for researcher requests by more than 50%. They also plan to reduce the manual effort and costs required per request, as well as any duplicative research and data generation. That can result in them doubling the researcher requests supported by its current team.

At Winship Cancer Institute at Emory University, meanwhile, researchers are using Manifold to securely access and analyze data from a real-world study conducted at another institution. 

Manifold also enables researchers to engage study participants, who can share information and consent to a range of activities so that researchers can gain a better view of a participant’s health journey.

"Our partners are looking for ways to increase research output and reduce time to insight without having to increase headcount. They are looking for ways to more efficiently manage their observational studies, to manage the varied data across their organizations, and collaborate with external partners across the industry," said Mohta. 

The new funding round, which brings the company's total raised to nearly $23 million, was led by TQ Ventures, with new investors Calibrate Ventures and SK Ventures, notable founders and CEOs such as healthcare leader Dr. Sachin H. Jain, and existing investors including TTCER Partners.

Manifold plans to use the money to reach and serve more customers with the platform capabilities it has today, while also maintaining its current pace of R&D investment to continue enhancing its technology to support more clinical research use cases.

"Our vision is to make clinical research 10x faster and one-tenth the cost. With our AI-powered platform, we’ll enable researchers to unlock far more value from their datasets and accelerate new insights that can improve patient care and outcomes. Until now, this has been entirely too slow and too expensive," said Mohta. 

(Image source: manifold.ai)