Pi Health: Oncology Clinical Trial Company Raises Over $30 Million

By Amit Chowdhry • Mar 15, 2024

Pi Health – an oncology-driven health technology and clinical research company focused on transforming global access to medicines and clinical trials – announced over $30 million in Series A funding. Incubated as a subsidiary of BeiGene three years ago, Pi Health raised this funding in a round led by AlleyCorp and Obvious Ventures, with additional investments from Invus Capital and leaders in oncology from across the globe.

Despite cancer being an illness that could affect anyone, the clinical trial system can be drastically improved. A small percentage of eligible cancer patients participate in clinical studies, which limits the understanding of the disease and how it affects a wide range of populations.

Pi Health’s platform increases patient enrollment worldwide by integrating software into a growing international network of clinical trial sites across four continents. This empowers life sciences companies to develop medicines, reaching a more diverse patient population at a faster rate. It also significantly reduces provider friction and biopharma costs.

Even though hundreds of SaaS solutions have entered the market, none are comprehensive. So the system’s infrastructure devolved into a group of point solutions with unnecessary software silos and convoluted workflows. Plus, none were built to seamlessly collect the type and quality of data that the FDA needs companies to submit.

Pi Health has built FICS (Front-End Interoperable Capture Software), which is a single-solution software connecting life science sponsors and trial sites. FICS automates manual processes for faster and higher-quality data collection and it captures finish-line data from the start. This leads to unprecedented speed and cost savings in the process of drug development, thus delivering life-saving medicines to patients sooner.

The software can also mitigate administrative issues and speed up clinical trial processes by implementing generative AI in features such as the automation of clinical documentation, patient matching, data transformations, and adverse event monitoring. The team also ensured this technology is relevant, resonant, and usable worldwide.

The Series A funding round will support Pi Health’s expansion of partnerships with global trial sites and life sciences companies and further development of its FICS technology.

KEY QUOTES:

“We’ve created an entirely new infrastructure for the clinical trial process, which has become mired in inefficiencies that impede progress. We have the technology, the team, and the global reach to make a genuine impact on the lives of people with cancer, along with other serious, life-threatening and rare diseases.”

– Co-founder and CEO Geoffrey Kim, M.D., who was formerly the Deputy Director of the Oncology Center of Excellence at the Food and Drug Administration (FDA)

“Today’s clinical trials infrastructure is a maze of Excel spreadsheets, paper binders and manual data entry into various point-solutions. Many companies have tried to solve this clinical trials conundrum. None has taken the bold, comprehensive and global approach that Pi Health has. I’ve known the founding team over the past decade, and am highly confident this is the team to do it.”

– Brenton Fargnoli, M.D., General Partner at AlleyCorp

“With Pi Health’s AI-driven platform, we believe that the entire clinical trial system will be revolutionized for the better. Pi Health has the potential to bring life-saving drugs and treatments to market faster and more efficiently, ultimately saving countless lives in the process. We’re proud to support Pi Health in their efforts to bring hope and healing to patients around the world.”

– Vishal Vasishth, Co-founder & Managing Director of Obvious Ventures