Patient data intelligence platform Culmination Bio raises $10M

The company works with pharma and biotech to help with drug development

Drug development is a lengthy and costly process, taking over ten years and costing over $1 billion. That's because, currently, there's no efficient process to bring a drug or diagnostic to market. This extended timeline results in patients waiting for better treatments and diagnostics. 

Culmination Bio, a spinoff from Intermountain Health, is solving that problem by offering a search engine for patient data that can pull information from its database to support researchers' unique queries. On Monday, the company announced a $10 million investment from Merck Global Health Innovation Fund (Merck GHI) and Amgen Ventures. 

"Pharmaceutical and biotech companies face significant financial and time risks, hindering their ability to develop new treatments without the right data. The existing data in the industry is often unstructured, fragmented, and lacks the breadth of longitudinal or multi-modal data,"  Lincoln Nadauld, MD, Ph.D., the president and CEO of Culimation Bio, told VatorNews. 

"We address these challenges by offering a disease-agnostic patient data intelligence platform. Our platform is built on 40 years of data and millions of biospecimens and patient journeys from electronic health records obtained through an exclusive partnership with Intermountain Health."

Culmination Bio maintains exclusive rights to a physical library and cloud-based data lake covering over 40 years of de-identified patient electronic health records and biospecimen data, enabling biopharmaceutical companies to gain insights to help with diagnostic and therapeutic development. 

"In the industry, there’s a dire need for access to longitudinal biological and clinical patient data, but it can take life sciences and biotech companies months to collect and process. Our solution can rapidly, usually within hours or days, pull the data from its repository to help answer researchers' questions," said Nadauld.

The company typically partners with pharmaceutical and life sciences companies across clinical R&D, drug discovery, hypothesis validation, and label expansion post-FDA approval. Customers submit specific queries on the patient cohorts they are studying, and Culmination Bio pulls only the data specific to their search, maintaining patient privacy and regulatory compliance.  It also accelerates patient recruitment by tapping into Intermountain Health’s network of patients across 33 healthcare facilities.

"Our efforts so far have not gone unnoticed, as our patient data repository has been instrumental in driving significant discoveries. These breakthroughs have found their way into publications such as Nature and JAMA, validating the quality and impact of our research," Nadauld said.

"We’ve identified eight genes linked to vertigo, six genes associated with migraines, and a staggering 93 genes contributing to blood clotting disorders."

Culmination Bio is currently working with various life science companies across pharma, diagnostics, and biotech, and it has agreements with several pharmaceutical companies and many biotech companies to provide access to the data they need to accelerate their R&D efforts. 

With the new funding, the company will be focusing on accelerating its commercial partnerships, developing its platform’s data repository, and expanding commercial growth.

"Our leadership team brings together over a century of collective experience, underscoring our commitment to excellence. We firmly believe that biospecimens and clinical EHR data play a pivotal role in unraveling the mysteries behind various health conditions. What sets us apart is our collaboration with Intermountain Health, where we have access not only to the physical biospecimens but also to the digital data associated with the patients' journeys in EHRs," Nadauld explained.

"The results help propel the industry forward with new insights, driving significant drug discoveries."