Clarity boost to follow Qureight’s $8.5m Series A funding round
Qureight has closed its significantly oversubscribed $8.5million Series A round in a massive show of support for Clarity, its unique cloud platform that leverages imaging data analytics and AI technology to help the best new drugs get approved.
Nine Hills Road-based Qureight’s digital infrastructure houses and curates multiple types of medical data for powerful analysis.
Since incorporation in 2018, it has established unique healthcare access through data contracts across NHS England and can collect CT scans, biomarkers and other trial endpoints directly from hospitals or clinical research organisations (CROs) in real time as a complex disease drug trial progresses.
This information is securely collated and structured, ready for analysis, and then provides insights which can be used to look for drug responses and find new endpoints. The structured data can also be used to build virtual trial patients, making it easier to run AI models and compare disparate data sets. The goal is to design more resource-efficient clinical trials, to improve existing disease treatments, and to develop powerful new drugs.
“We’re not making the drug,” clarifies Dr Muhunthan Thillai, founder and CEO of Qureight in a video call. “Other companies use AI to find drugs. Our argument is ‘you find the drug, and our platform helps you speed up the process to get to the end’.
“Between being discovered and being in use for patients, nine out of 10 drugs fail, so our AI technology will help you understand if the drug you already have is any good or not.”
Clarity – “it’s an internal name we’ve never told anyone, so you’re the first” – extracts 3D features from the 2D images of convolutional neural networks (CNNs) sent in from hospitals or CROs.
Qureight is initially targeting the $6.8bn, rapidly-growing market for clinical trial imaging analysis and data curation in lung and heart disease such as idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis (IPF) and pulmonary hypertension, which currently have limited treatment options and poor survival rates.
The funding round was supported by investors including XTX Ventures, Guinness Ventures, and existing investors including Playfair Capital, Meltwind, and Ascension Life Fund.
“The majority of the funding will go into platform infrastructure, plus hiring data scientists, software engineers, and machine learning scientists,” says Dr Thillai, noting that the team of 15 – “mostly in Cambridge with a few in London” – has been bolstered with the arrival of Dr Simon Walsh, a London-based consultant thoracic radiologist, as CSO, and two new board members, Dr Debra Barker (previous SVP Novartis) and Jenny Winter (CEO of Animalcare Group).
Chris Smith, managing partner at Playfair Capital, said: “With the Qureight platform delivering never-before-available insights, the impact is far-reaching – pharma companies generate millions of dollars from better decision-making and patients benefit from more efficacious therapies sooner.”
Dr Malcolm King, chief investment officer at Guinness Ventures, said: “We have been impressed by Qureight’s potential to help its customers accelerate discovery of new treatments for complex lung and heart disease.”
Dr Thillai concluded: “The close of our Series A round marks the ‘end of the beginning’ and the start of a new chapter for Qureight, as we turn our focus to developing our platform and creating products in new disease areas.
“Our mission to extend the lives of lung and heart disease patients will be bolstered by the invaluable expertise of our new board and new senior team members, and we are looking forward to adding to our strategic biopharma collaborations.”
