| The moolah
On Tuesday, Israeli startup QuantHealth picked up $45 million in Series B financing. The company, which sells a simulation platform that tests clinical trials virtually before running them, has now raised $70 million since its founding in 2020. The Series B round was led by Qumra Capital, with participation from other funds including Sanofi Ventures, Pitango HealthTech, Artofin Venture Capital Fund and Esplanade Ventures. How it works
By using AI to simulate clinical trials before they begin, the startup’s platform can pinpoint how different patients will respond to treatment, which should ultimately lead to fewer trial failures and quicker access to more effective therapies for patients, Inbar explained. QuantHealth's platform combines AI with large biomedical knowledge graphs, allowing it to capture clinical patterns at high resolution and identify insights into how drugs actually work in the body, he said. That approach also lets the platform extend its predictions beyond large patient populations to rare diseases and small subpopulations, using transfer learning to generalize insights that would otherwise require far more data than exists for those groups. Inbar pointed out that QuantHealth’s AI models can predict potential patient outcomes to existing and novel therapies with up to 90% accuracy. Having those predictions in hand before a trial even begins allows pharma companies to reduce patient exposure to treatments that are unlikely to work, he remarked. To date, QuantHealth has simulated more than 600 clinical trials across 30 indications, Inbar added. Competition
As for competitors, Inbar noted that Noetik — an oncology-focused AI company that uses biological data to help drugmakers match patients to treatments — is occasionally brought up in the same conversation as QuantHealth. “We're different in scope and stage. Noetik works within a single disease area, oncology, and centers on biological stratification of patients, while we simulate across multiple clinical trial stages, endpoints and therapeutic areas — answering questions like: Will this trial succeed? Should we change the endpoints, optimize the patient population, or adjust the design in some other way?” Inbar explained. Instead of identifying the right patients for a treatment, QuantHealth helps determine whether the treatment — and the trial designed to test it — is set up to succeed in the first place. — By Katie Adams |
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