QuantHealth says pharma ‘on brink of major crisis’ and $15M funding for AI will help
The funding round was co-led by Bertelsmann Investments and Pitango, with participation from existing investors including Shoni Top Ventures, Nina Capital, Boston Millennia Partners, Atooro Fund, Beecher & Co, and Renegade Ventures.
QuantHealth found the pharmaceutical industry spends $50 billion annually throughout drug discovery trials, happening at a time when 90% are failing due to lack of safety and efficacy endpoints.
The company says it was founded with a mission to solve these pain points, enabling pharmaceutical companies to accelerate drug development and discovery by using artificial intelligence to simulate clinical trials.
“According to a recent Deloitte article, over the last several decades, ROI on pharmaceutical research and development has steadily declined, reaching under 2 percent in 2020,” said Orr Inbar, CEO, and co-founder of QuantHealth.
“This steep decline is happening at a time when the need for drug development has never been greater. With big pharma on the brink of a major crisis, we firmly believe that AI solutions like ours will pave the way in dramatically reducing the costs of clinical trials and accelerate drug discovery.”
The 90% failure rate, it says, represents a direct $45 billion annual waste to pharma companies.
QuantHealth says it wants to address this challenge at its core and says as well as predicting patient outcomes, it can allow trial design teams to predict how an entire clinical trial will play out and adapt accordingly.
Based on its novel AI engine and a vast dataset of 350 million patients and over 700k therapeutics, QuantHealth's simulator can predict clinical trial results with high accuracy, allowing users to answer mission critical questions such as trial go/no-go, cohort optimization, drug repurposing, and more.
QuantHealth’s series A funding round comes hot on the heels of the company announcing its expansion into the US market, along with a series of executive appointments including David Dornstreich as chief commercial officer and co-founder Arnon Horev as chief business officer.
The new funding will be used for product development and expansion of the platform beyond clinical trials and into new use cases including regulatory support, early research and development, and development strategy.
“The pharmaceutical industry is facing an immediate urgency in fixing its current broken research and development process,” said a spokesperson at Bertelsmann Investments. “We’re proud to partner with QuantHealth, whose AI technologies have proven to save pharmaceutical companies millions, helping them bring drugs to market quicker and get patients the treatments they need.”
QuantHealth was founded by healthcare experts who led commercial, product, and data science at various leading companies in the US and Israel. The company is backed by expert life science investors in the US, Europe and Israel, and is supported by an advisory board of physicians and scientists from leading academic institutions.
