A new healthcare data company has emerged with the promise of making patient data more useful for the discovery of new diagnoses and interventions.
This company is based in St. Louis, Missouri CuriMetawho spear Tuesday and announced the closing of a $6 million seed funding round led by BJC Healthcare and the Washington University School of Medicine (WashU Medicine)who are also both based in St. Louis.
Davis Walp, founder and CEO of CuriMeta, said in an interview that he and his team have spent the past two years working with BJC and WashU Medicine to incubate the company. The company’s mission is to leverage the deep data resources of its two institutional partners to create greater research value for healthcare providers and life science manufacturers.
Most EHR data is optimized for care delivery, not research, Walp pointed out. CuriMeta helps by cleaning, curating and annotating data on various disease states for its clients so that they can close their cycles of evidence more quickly when developing new interventions. The company sells this data to pharmaceutical and device companies.
“We are creating advanced real-world data because we want to provide researchers with a much more complete and comprehensive view of human biology and the impact that treatments have on groups of patients and the nature of a disease. -even,” Walp said. “We’re creating 360-degree surround sound views of patient populations that researchers can use to really move the needle.”
CuriMeta takes steps to ensure the security of its data, primarily through the use of artificial intelligence to create synthetic datasets. Synthetic data refers to computationally derived datasets that are statistically identical to actual patient datasets, but housed in a separate and distinct location to minimize the risk of a data breach.
Using CuriMeta, BJC and WashU Medicine can transform their approach to research from reactive to proactive, said Philip Payne, founding director of the Institute for Informatics at WashU. He pointed out that as an academic healthcare system, BJC would often be approached by life science or biotech companies wanting to access its data and expertise to learn more about disease progression and how whose patients respond to certain treatments and interventions.
For Payne, this is not a particularly strategic research approach because BJC was simply reacting to opportunities that presented themselves rather than pursuing research projects of its own design.
“In creating CuriMeta, what we’re really doing is creating a forward-looking and strategic approach to seeking out partners who work in areas that best fit our needs in terms of patient populations, expertise, and research resources. data,” Payne said. .
CuriMeta will focus on data related to critical disease areas where BJC’s patient population perceives a heavy burden, such as cardiovascular disease, cancer and neurodegeneration. Life science companies and other organizations seeking access to real-word data from CuriMeta for their research projects must be approved by BJC and WashU Medicine to ensure that their research is focused on unmet medical needs that are important to their patients.
Walp said CuriMeta’s close relationship with BJC and WashU Medicine helps differentiate the company from other companies that sell real health data. He pointed out that both organizations have thousands of experts available to help inform and accelerate research in nearly every clinical area. Other companies that aggregate and sell real-world data and analytics include Aetion, Syapse, Tempus, and Komodo Health.
Payne added that many real-world health data companies provide large-scale, highly curated datasets that tend to be very broad but not necessarily very deep. However, most of the problems driving biomedicine will only be solved by new diagnostics and therapies that require much deeper data analysis, he said.
“These solutions require multi-scale data that not only includes data from the EHR, but also features extracted from imaging variants that we might uncover through patient sequencing, not to mention other indicators that might help us understand the impact of the social determinants of health and disease,” Payne said. “We are building a data platform that makes deep, representative data from diverse populations available for much-needed research.”
Photo: Metamorworks, Getty Images
