Atropos Healtha health technology company focused on generating personalized real-world evidence, today announced that it has raised $33 million in a Series B funding roundThe round included strategic investments from healthcare giants McKesson, Merck and Cencora Ventures, signaling strong industry interest in Atropos' mission to supply automated, high-quality evidence to support patient care decisions.
The Silicon Valley-based startup plans to make use of the fresh capital to expand its operations and double down on key initiatives, including entering the life sciences space, expanding distribution partnerships in value-based care and oncology, and expanding its evidence network of knowledge partners.
“We're on a mission to supply personalized healthcare credentials to one and all on this planet, so that is one other step in that journey,” said Dr. Brigham Hyde, CEO and co-founder of Atropos Health, in an interview with VentureBeat. “In particular, we're going to make use of this to double down on our strategic initiatives, which include continuing our entry into life sciences and constructing on our strong traction there. We're also going to double down on our distribution partners, particularly in value-based healthcare and specialty care in oncology.”
Shaping the longer term of healthcare with AI-powered clinical evidence generation
Atropos’ core technology, Geneva OSuses AI and automation to rapidly generate clinical evidence from real-world data. Geneva OS was developed over nearly a decade of research at Stanford and powers applications equivalent to Atropos' generative AI assistant ChatRWDThe platform enables physicians, researchers and other healthcare stakeholders to quickly access reliable clinical evidence tailored to specific patient populations – something the corporate says is missing in today's healthcare system.
“We speak about an idea called the evidence gap,” Hyde explained. “Our statistics say that only about 14% of on a regular basis medical decisions are supported by high-quality evidence. That's pretty shocking if you happen to're not in our field. But the explanations for which can be well-known – publications within the literature are based on clinical trials, we don't do enough trials… What if we could use high-quality data, properly and accurately analyzed, to fill that evidence gap?”
Closing the evidence gap: Personalized insights for higher patient outcomes
Closing this “evidence gap” is central to Atropos' mission. The company believes that higher patient outcomes will likely be achieved when physicians have easy accessibility to personalized evidence from patients just like the patient in query. Hyde gave the instance of a physician treating a patient with heart failure:
“We have different patient populations, they often have comorbidities and different medical histories,” he said. “What you actually need is evident evidence for those subpopulations — evidence that will not yet be within the literature or in clinical trials… Let's not treat all heart failure patients the identical. Let's find evidence for certain subgroups which have higher outcomes and control costs for those patients.”
Accelerating pharmaceutical research and development through automation of real-world evidence
The applications of Atropos technology transcend clinical decision-making at the purpose of care. The company works with pharmaceutical giants equivalent to Janssen to speed up drug development by providing evidence for clinical trial design, patient recruitment, and more. Hyde suggested that the platform could even be used to simulate clinical trials.
“What if we had the power to get key evidence and insights earlier to speed up the planning and development of your trials,” Hyde told VentureBeat. “What if that information allowed us to recruit more effectively and more trials to achieve success? What if we could even simulate clinical trials and know upfront which of them are likely to achieve success and which of them should not? All of this revolves around reducing cycle time in R&D and de-risking clinical trials.”
Atropos' Series B comes at a time when interest in applying generative AI in specialty areas equivalent to healthcare is growing, but Hyde believes the important thing to success is constructing trust through methodological rigor and transparency.
“Although there may be numerous excitement in regards to the LLMs, frankly, what worries us most is the speed of hallucinations,” he said. “Geneva is ensuring there are not any hallucinations, that the standard is clinically sound, that it’s incredibly transparent – a decade of publications on the way it is completed – and that users can trust the end result.”
With fresh capital and a high-profile list of strategic backers, Atropos is well positioned to bring its vision of personalized, automated clinical evidence to healthcare worldwide. But Hyde stressed that that is only the start:
“I believe evidence is the currency of value in healthcare… What if I could give (doctors) an increasing number of personalized evidence to assist them make a greater decision?” Hyde said. “Basically, we're attempting to get the world to some extent where all patients and all providers have access to high-quality, personalized evidence to tell their decision-making.”
