QuantHealth is an AI company conducting patient-centric drug simulations to accelerate and de-risk drug development. Pulse 2.0 interviewed QuantHealth co-founder and CEO Orr Inbar to learn more.
Orr Inbar’s Background
Inbar spent the last 15 years in life science as an executive, applied researcher, data scientist, product builder, and AI expert. Inbar said:
“Before QuantHealth, I co-founded ConcertAI, a leader in precision oncology, where I led data science and engineering. Prior to that I held a variety of leadership roles in small and large life-science technology companies in Israel and the US, where I led R&D, product development, and customer delivery teams. I have an MA in Information Technology from Harvard University, and a B.Sc in Biochemistry from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst.”
Formation Of QuantHealth
How did the idea for the company come together? Inbar shared:
“With over 30 years of collective experience across the founders in life-sciences and drug development, it was clear to us that the decreasing success rates of clinical trials was becoming an untenable situation for the industry. With hardly any solutions in sight, it was clear that this was something we needed to solve.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges have you faced in building the company? Inbar acknowledged:
“One of the largest challenges we faced, and still do, as an AI company that is focused on the fundamentals of good research and high quality solutions, is to overcome the reputation of subpar AI solutions in the industry, which unfortunately many companies, both small and large, contributed to over the years.”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Inbar explained:
“Our company’s software combines data points from across the clinical and drug development spectrum and predicts patient response to novel therapies, allowing pharma and biotech customers to run variations of their clinical trials to optimize the trial design and increase the probability of trial success, enabling discovery of new clinical opportunities and optimization strategies.”
Evolution Of QuantHealth’s Technology
How has the company’s technology evolved since launching? Inbar noted:
“When we started, our technology focused on drug repurposing within a hemato-oncology. Over time, we honed our methodologies to be able model novel therapies and new targets, leveraging increasingly larger and more complex datasets, and expanding our reach into solid tumors, cardiovascular disease, respiratory, and auto-immune disease.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Inbar cited:
“This summer we entered the US market, to bring AI solutions for solving the $45 billion in annual losses life science companies face during clinical trials. To lead our team in the United States, we hired David Dornstreich as Chief Commercial Officer and General Manager of U.S. Operations. We also announced on August 30th that we have raised a $15 million Series A funding round co-led by Bertelsmann Investments and Pitango.”
Customer Success Stories
After asking Inbar about customer success stories, he replied:
“In a recent case study, we helped a sponsor design their phase-2 trial in acute respiratory distress syndrome. By simulating thousands of protocol variations, we were able to make minor amendments to their protocol that had far reaching consequences- 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 of the primary endpoint by 16.5%.”
Funding
When asking Inbar about the company’s funding, he revealed:
“In October of last year, we secured $2.6 million in seed funding to advance our clinical trial simulation platform. As I mentioned previously we have also just announced our $15 million Series A funding round which we will use for product development and expansion of the platform beyond clinical trials.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Inbar assessed:
“The initial TAM of the company addressed by its flagship product of trial design is approximately $2.5 billion. Since then, we have expanded our use cases both upstream and downstream, addressing a total market size of approximately $15 billion.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Inbar affirmed:
“Our AI solution is based on the integration of a large real-world dataset of over 350 million patients with a biomedical knowledge-graph of over 700K biomedical entities and therapeutics. This unique integration allows for granular and comprehensive simulations, which is already applied by various pharma customers in the US and EU.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future goals? Inbar concluded:
“QuantHealth started out supporting clinical development teams with its flagship trial design solution, but is now working on expanding its platform both upstream, to support preclinical and drug discovery functions, as well downstream, to support clinical operations and commercial functions. With this path towards a vertically integrated platform, we strive to be the premier clinical operating system for pharma companies.”
