QuantHealth Secures $15M Investment for AI-Enhanced US Clinical Drug Trials

0:00The first thing I want to talk about here is the fact that biotech, pharmaceutical, and life science companies are all right now hoping that AI is going to streamline drug development and make it more efficient. And I think around 38 % have already adopted the technology. And that's all, you know, that's according to Deloitte, which has typically some fairly good statistics on this. One of those is QuantHealth. And QuantHealth essentially right now is aiming to take part with a model that predicts risks and outcomes for clinical trials. So the company's AI-powered platform for drug discovery claims to reduce potential risks, optimize clinical trials and help identify how patients in a clinical trial would respond to treatment.

0:40This is really interesting and not something that we're always looking at, right? They're trying to essentially predict the patient's response before they even do the trial. Very interesting. So this is a Tel Aviv-based startup and on Wednesday they said that they are going to be raising, well essentially I guess they just raised, a$15 million Series A funding round which brings it to now around$20 million total that they have raised. And this is what they said about it. They said, With over 30 years of collective experience in life, science, and drug development, it was clear to us that the decreasing success rate of clinical trials were becoming untenable for the industry.

1:19So that's the co-founder and CEO who is Or Inbar. And he also cited Deloitte. He noted that return on investments have declined to historical lows, which is very, very interesting. So the differentiator claimed by QuantHealth's platform is one of the most extensive integrated data sets, which Inbar described as covering over 350 million patent patients and more than 700 ,000 biomedical graphs and clinical trials. So the company said the resulting model can predict clinical trial outcomes with a 86 % accuracy on the binary endpoint metric. This is absolutely crazy. An 86 % accuracy is absolutely phenomenal.

2:06I mean, obviously, this is a massive data set they were able to ingest here, right? 350 million patients, 700 ,000 biomedical graphs and clinical trials. This is a lot of really impressive data. And I think it's a really, really big hats off to them on being able to get such a high accuracy rate. So that actually means that the company predicts success or failure for a trial's primary endpoint or any other endpoint 86 % of the time. So more than 90 % of traditionally planned clinical trials fail to make it to market due to lack of efficiency and safety. So Inbar actually said, some drugs just shouldn't go to trial and for many that should, the trials are poorly designed.

2:52This causes the trials to take longer, cost more, and fail more often. So in a recent case study, Quant Health actually helped a client design their phase two trial in acute respiratory distress syndrome. And they said, quote, by simulating thousands of protocol variations, we were able to make minor amendments to their protocol that had far reaching consequences by increasing the target population by 4.5x, reducing study duration by 11 months, reducing the number of participants required by 251. all while improving the likelihood of success for the primary endpoint by 16.5%. So this company was actually QuantHealth.

3:35I think this was founded back in 2020, which has been commercially active, I think, for the last two years. And it works for pharma, biotechnics, and clinical research organizations supporting their programs on an ongoing basis, as well as regulators in the US and Europe. So back in June, QuantHealth announced its U.S. expansion with executive appointments, including David Dornstrich, who is the chief commercial officer and co-founder, Arnon Horev, as chief strategy and operations officer. So the CEO said that the outfit has 25 employees in Israel, and the U.S. is aiming to grow to 40 by next year.

4:16So Berchel Mann investment and pitigo health tech co-led the series a funding round that this this 15 million dollars that they just raised and i think their existing backers shoni top ventures nita capital nova capital also joined in the latest round they followed on so the new capital is going to be used to enable the startup to support clinical development teams with its flagship trial design solution and expand its platform for pre-clinical and drug discovery functions as well as expand its commercial team and operations. As you know, I'm super excited and bullish on any use of AI in healthcare to help essentially increase patient outcomes.

4:57I think this is a really interesting space that they're tackling right here. Definitely there is a need in the market. Definitely this is a niche product that is going to help a lot of people. So I think this is definitely going to be a product that's very interesting to follow and to see how this is helping us develop faster, more effective, and safer drugs in the future.