Accenture announced it has made a strategic investment, through Accenture Ventures, in QuantHealth, an AI-powered clinical trial design company that simulates clinical trials in the cloud, allowing pharmaceutical and biotech companies to more quickly and cost-effectively develop treatments for patients.
With proprietary AI technology trained on a massive dataset of 350 million patients, large biomedical knowledge-graphs, and clinical trial data, QuantHealth’s simulation platform can predict trial outcomes with significant accuracy. It can test thousands of protocol variations and discover the optimal trial design for success, helping research and development (R&D) teams more accurately and rapidly predict clinical trial results and decide whether a trial should proceed, how to optimize cohorts, whether drugs can be repurposed, and other crucial factors.
“QuantHealth’s clinical trial simulation platform can fast-track clinical trials and help pharmaceutical and biotech companies bring life-saving treatments to patients” said Tom Lounibos, global lead of Accenture Ventures. “By accelerating and enhancing global drug discovery efforts, we’ll aim to work alongside QuantHealth, our clients and ecosystem partners to expand medicine and treatment options and find new opportunities to bolster patient care.”
Clinical trials can cost billions of dollars to execute, with only 10% of drugs making it to market. Each year, trial failures collectively cost companies billions of dollars in losses, representing an estimated 20% of the global pharmaceutical R&D budget. Drug population and drug protocol fit account for nearly 75% of these failures. By simulating trials at scale, QuantHealth’s platform can lower risks, expedite, and optimize drug development. QuantHealth is already working with several global pharmaceutical companies to use its product in clinical trial design and development.
Petra Jantzer, Ph.D., global lead of the Accenture Life Sciences business, said, "Through our investment in QuantHealth, we are further solidifying our commitment to utilizing advanced technologies to bring revolutionary change in the pharmaceutical industry. With the aid of AI-designed clinical trial simulations, we can reduce the cost and duration of creating effective medications, which is crucial for improving health outcomes."
“Clinical trials are a costly and uncertain process, where the R&D cost of a new drug can be upwards of $1 billion,” said Orr Inbar, co-founder and CEO of QuantHealth. “QuantHealth has created a solution that uses AI to transform how pharmaceutical companies approach their clinical trials. We’re able to seamlessly integrate data and cloud technology into the clinical trial process, not only saving time and money for pharmaceutical companies, but also increasing the chance of success in drug development. Accenture’s long-standing experience in this industry and leadership in data and AI will help us continue to scale our platform globally.”
QuantHealth is the latest company to join Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight, an engagement and investment program focused on working with companies that create or apply disruptive enterprise technologies. Project Spotlight offers extensive access to Accenture’s domain expertise and its enterprise clients, helping startups harness creativity and deliver on the promise of their technology. Additional digital simulation companies in Project Spotlight include Virtonomy and Ocean Genomics.
Terms of the investment were not disclosed.
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