London-based Vinehealth has raised $5.5 million in seed funding. The digital health platform uses a combination of behavioural science and AI to help cancer patients track, manage, and better understand their care. The funding is set to help the startup further develop its product, grow the team, and commence with a US market expansion plan. Since 2018 Vinehealth has raised a total of $8.5 million.
Founded by Rayna Patel and Georgina Kirby, in addition to the aforementioned patient support, through a series of data collection points, the Vinehealth app also feeds pharmaceutical companies with critical data to develop and deliver scalable patient support programmes. Likewise, this patient-reported data can also be used to underscore and further clinical trials and studies.
With precisely this type of data in such high demand by pharmaceutical companies, insurers, and hospitals, Vinehealth has cemented its position as a preferred supplier of choice to six top 10 global pharmaceutical companies and contract research organisations, including Swiss pharma giant Novartis.
One of the biggest challenges in the treatment and care of cancer has traditionally been the lack of patient reported outcome (PRO) data. Low adherence and patient engagement are often cited as chief reasons for pharmaceutical companies’ slow progress, with drugs failing or experiencing serious delays in the mass deployment of often highly toxic oncology drug products. Obviously, treatments that can't be taken lightly, and require gargantuan amounts of research data to get right.
And so it would seem that if Vinehealth can tackle two problems with one go, giving cancer patients a much better understanding of just what’s going on within their own bodies, and providing treatment makers with much sought after data, a much brighter future might be just over the horizon for many.
“It’s imperative that we start understanding how therapies are affecting patients: for pharmaceutical companies, our technology enables deeper patient understanding which leads to better drugs, greater differentiation and faster licensing, as well as the ability to provide personalised scalable support to patients,” explained Patel. “For patients, this means better care and improved outcomes from cancer. We’re now looking forward to applying our rich data and machine learning capabilities to novel predictive analytics to generate even richer insights for our life science partners.”
Vinehealth’s seed funding round was led by Talis Capital and saw participation from previous investors Playfair Capital and Ascension. A vast number of angel investors also participated and include Keith Gibbs, former CEO of AXA PPP Healthcare; Pam Garside, partner at Newhealth; WIRED founding editor and lead at VOYAGERS Health-Tech Fund, David Rowan; David Giampaolo, healthcare entrepreneur and founder of PI Capital; venture partner at Speedinvest and Atomico Angel, Deepali Nangia; Faisal Mehmud, Vice President, International Developed Markets Medical head, Pfizer Oncology and former Medical Director of Bristol Myers Squibb; and KHP MedTech Innovations, a collaboration between King's College London, King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Trust.
“The Vinehealth platform’s ability to efficiently support precision patient activation in an automated manner; rapidly amalgamate rich high volume frequent patient data; use AI to identify clinically relevant patterns that can serve as important patient interventions - combined with an industry-leading interface and user acceptability - will, I believe, make Vinehealth’s tool the benchmark against which other platforms will be measured in the future,” commented Mehmud.
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