I've spent the last few days at Slush in Helsinki. There's snow and lots of amazing startups — and, of course, the infamous Slush 100 startup competition, where startups compete for a cool €1 million in funding.
Today, Tech.eu was granted an exclusive interview with OASYS NOW, the winner of Slush 100.
Netherlands startup OASYS NOW is on a mission to make personalised healthcare and precision medicine accessible to all.
The company is currently focused on cardiology, rare diseases, and multiple chronic diseases. It has developed an AI-powered clinical trial patient identification and recruitment platform for hospitals, doctors, and research nurses who find patients eligible for medical research studies.
It meta-crawls research trial criteria and provides healthcare providers with checklists that can be cross-matched with EHRs to find trial options. This automates a large chunk of the time spent trawling through research eligibility criteria for individual studies.
Oasys Now will go on to secure an equity investment of €1,000,000 from General Catalyst and Cherry Ventures. Cherry Ventures, Europe’s leading early-stage VC guided by its “founders first” ethos, joins as a Slush 100 partner for the first time this year. General Catalyst, a returning partner since 2022, is renowned for its commitment to visionary founders and long-term growth.
Last year’s winner, Faircado, has since gone on to raise €3 million - exemplifying the transformative potential of this award.
I spoke to OASYS NOW co-founders, CEO Nima Salami and CTO Sara Okhuijsen.
You can also check out our earlier interviews with OASYS NOW CEO Nima Salami.
Research participant shortages hamper medical innovation
When it comes to new modes and healthcare treatment and drug discovery, many innovations are thwarted in the early stages. Not due to the science but a lack of research participants.
According to Salami, around 80 per cent of trials fail to meet the initial enrollment target and timeline, and these delays can result in lost revenue of up to $8 million per day for drug-developing companies.
OASYS NOW is building the EU's first AI-powered Patient Recruitment platform for Clinical Trials. It consists of two main products:
- GRIP app: This app empowers individuals to take control of their health data. Users can gain personal health insights and discover relevant clinical trials, accelerating access to treatments.
- ELaiGIBLE Platform: This platform streamlines the process of identifying eligible patient cohorts for clinical trials, reducing the time from months to minutes for trial sites (hospitals and clinics) and Clinical Research Officers (CROs). Health professionals can connect with multiple clinical trial databases, and identify relevant trial options with the click of a button. Health data is automatically matched to clinical trial eligibility criteria, so their patients get personalised matches.
From heart disease to immunology
The company has expanded its reach from primarily heart conditions to brain-related diseases such as Alzheimer's, Parkinson's, and Dementia as well as immunology. Okhuijsen notes that
"The technology is very easy to adapt to different therapeutic areas. So we're just identifying where the most needs are and which clients can quickly adopt our technology."
Making new tech accessible to healthcare providers is key
Gaining traction in the healthcare sector is no easy task. OASYS NOW patient-centric üprivacy design approach has attracted interest from healthcare professionals.
Okhuijsen asserts that one reason healthcare has been predominantly hesitant to adopt new technology is that "they weren't surrounded by people who could tell them what is possible now. So we go where they are and share with them through public lectures and workshops. This also gives people names and faces to the technology. They get to know us and see how we develop and evolve the tech over time.
Research recruiters and staff well receive the AI assistant because it's very explainable. According to Okhuijsen:
"Our algorithm, while seemingly complex, is designed to be user-friendly. It not only processes data but also provides clear explanations for its decisions.
This transparency empowers end-users to agree or disagree with the algorithm's recommendations and provide valuable feedback.
This approach contrasts sharply with traditional methods that rely on research nurses with advanced data science skills to write complex queries.
Our algorithm simplifies the process, making it accessible to a wider range of users."
The value of privacy by design
OASYS NOW's technologies are built compliant-by-design and are thus fully GDPR compliant. An external party continuously monitors its ISO27001 compliance.
According to Salami, privacy-first a choice.
"So it's transparency over the data you use and giving people a choice over how it should be used. We use the best data security possible to ensure the least amount of data is used so that it's not used for purposes outside those agreed upon."
The company is also developing a third product that will enable genetic researchers worldwide to collaborate on large data sets without moving the data.
Salami shared:
"Every researcher, no matter where they are in the world, can learn from other researchers' data somewhere else. Without that data having to move.
Moving data is expensive, but when you move data, you lose control over it."
The company is tackling this through confidential federated learning with extra layers of security whereby the data is encrypted at rest and in transit."
This approach has attracted interest from NVIDIA and Google. According to Salami, it gives the team validation that "by prioritising privacy first, you can come up with novel ideas of how things can be done, which wasn't possible before.
Hot on the heels of their win, the team at OASYS Now is full of praise for Slush. Okhuijsen notes that the competition is a very public VC pipeline.
"The top 20 startups go through a due diligence process which includes interviews with the VC patterns. So, it's a great funnel in a very professional, publicly known competition.
The funds will assist with expanding the team, especially engineers and salespeople, and will also help finance compute power.
Runners-up were women's healthcare science company Mohana (Canada) and AI-driven accessibility compliance platform Dev Ally — stay tuned for an interview with Dev Ally co-founders Cormac Chisholm, CEO, and Patrick Guiney-Fox COO, in the next couple of weeks.
Lead image: OASYS NOW by Petri Anttila.
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