Atropos Health raises funding to close the evidence gap

The company will the money to expand its platform into Japan and Brazil

Atropos Health is a company looking to close the evidence gap, in which 70% of the US population is systematically excluded from clinical trials, even though 65% of the spending is on this same population, including people with comorbidities, certain racial and demographic groups, women, children, and rare disease populations.

Now it will be able to expand its services into new markets thanks to a new strategic funding round announced on Thursday from the Sumitomo Corporation VC arm Presidio Ventures, Samsung Next, Gaingels, Audere Capital, and others.

Though the company didn;'t disclose the size of the round, a form with the SEC in August showed the company having raised $3.3 million of a $5 million total offering.

Founded in 2020, Atropos' platform aggregates data from millions of patient charts so it can answer physician questions, and then generates a report, which it calls a Prognostogram.

For example, if a pediatric cardiologist is seeing a new patient with an incidental diagnosis of atrial septal aneurysm, they might want to find out about the need for anticoagulation. However, the existing literature might not be helpful for a variety of reasons, either because a study answering the question hasn't been done yet, the available evidence is unreliable, or the evidence doesn't apply to their patient.

When a physician poses the question, which can be done through their EMR or from the company's online portal, it cleans up the data in the electronic health record and then uses a novel search engine to generate patient cohorts and perform statistical analyses to provide an answer.

The Atropos team works with the physician to refine the question, perform the analysis, and to provide an interpretation of what the results mean for their patient. Atropos' clinicians will also discuss and clarify any follow-up questions.

In June, the company partnered with Datavant, a data ecosystem that enables healthcare stakeholders, such as patients, providers, payers, health analytics companies, and life sciences companies, to securely and compliantly exchange patient-level data. The partnership allowed members of the Datavant ecosystem to have access to the Atropos Evidence Platform, while members of Atropos Evidence Network will be able to use Datavant’s services.

"The collaboration is off to a great start, bringing value to common health system clients. We will be participating at the upcoming Datavant Summit in Washington, DC in October," Dr. Brigham Hyde, CEO and Co-Founder of Atropos Health, told VatorNews.

The company also recently expanded its Evidence Platform to serve the life sciences sector, offering analytics augmentation, faster data evaluation, evidence generation, and artificial intelligence innovations.

"Companies within the life sciences sector can now use a specialized version of our award-winning Green Button Clinical Informatics Consult Service, which has been widely adopted by clinicians at institutions such as Stanford Health Care. The Green Button combines the Evidence Platform's technologies with clinical informatics support to generate evidence in 48 hours in a private library," said Hyde.

"This enables life science companies to maximize their real-world data assets for iterative hypothesis testing, protocol feasibility, cohort analysis, treatment pathways, patient journeys, unmet need, label expansion, and regulatory initiatives."

Finally, Atropos also also formed a Life Science Advisory Board, which includes Sean Khozin MD, MPH and Gerry McDougall. The board will advance Atropos Health's aim to resolve high priority business needs with evidence from real-world data.

The company plans to use the funding to accelerate commercial and development opportunities outside the U.S., with an initial focus on customers in Japan and Brazil. The platform is currently live in Brazil, and is working with Albert Einstein University and Unimed, and it expects to be live in Japan and other APC countries this fall. Its partnership with Presidio Sumitomo and Samsung Health are directly designed to support these efforts.

"The need to generate population specific evidence for care from real world data is a truly global tenet. In Japan and Brazil this need is as high as anywhere, our model also works best when supported by in-country partners and in both cases strong partnership is the key to bringing our solution there first," explained Hyde.

"In addition, the Atropos Federated deployment model makes compliance with privacy and data security regulations much easier than with other solutions."

With this expansion the company expects to end 2023 with between 20 and 25 customers globally across Health care providers and Life Sciences.

"Atropos’ mission is to bring personalized evidence to every care decision globally. It is a large goal, but one we feel is within reach. We have a number of exciting announcements including new partners and product launches that will help further this goal," said Hyde.

(Image source: atroposhealth.com)