COLUMBUS, Ohio–(BUSINESS WIRE)–lt;a href="https://twitter.com/hashtag/AI?src=hash" target="_blank"gt;#AIlt;/agt;–Deep
Lens, Inc., an AI-driven digital pathology company focused on
clinical trial recruitment at the time of diagnosis, announced today the
company has closed a $14 million Series A financing, led by Northpond
Ventures. Existing investors Rev1 Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and
Tamarind-Hill Partners also participated in this round, which comes just
three months after Deep Lens closed its VC-led seed equity round.
Funding to date now totals $17.5 million.
Deep Lens will use the funding proceeds to further expand its artificial
intelligence (AI) and platform product development activities and scale
its service, sales, and marketing organizations to support current and
anticipated demand and growth for its disruptive approach to clinical
trial recruitment.
“Since our inception, we’ve benefitted from a tremendous group of
investors, which now includes the world class team at Northpond
Ventures,” said Deep Lens co-founder and CEO Dave Billiter. “This Series
A financing is further validation of the value of our industry-changing
approach to digital pathology in delivering the right cancer diagnoses
faster and accelerating oncology trial recruitment and timelines.”
The company’s flagship technology, called VIPER (Virtual Imaging for
Pathology Education and Research), was originally developed for research
purposes in Columbus, Ohio where it was the de-facto platform for global
oncology studies including The Cancer Genome Atlas Project (TCGA) and
others, before being commercialized by Deep Lens. VIPER combines
artificial intelligence (AI) with advanced pathology workflows while
also facilitating peer-to-peer collaboration and patient identification
for clinical trials. The ultimate aim is to provide users with fast and
accurate information, along with expert consultation, for better patient
care and advanced clinical research.
“In the past year we have successfully launched our industry leading
platform, VIPER, to the pathology industry at-large, we have integrated
deep learning (AI) and we have made VIPER available free-of-charge to
pathology groups worldwide as we work to identify patients at the time
of diagnosis for available clinical trials,” said TJ Bowen, Ph.D.,
co-founder and chief scientist.
Simon Arkell, president and co-founder added, “With this additional
capital, we will move to quickly leverage our successes in the pathology
industry and apply a highly disruptive approach to patient
identification in clinical trials, one of the most expensive and time
intensive issues faced by the pharmaceutical industry.”
Patient recruitment for clinical trials remains a time-intensive, costly
barrier to the execution of drug development programs. More than 14,000
oncology clinical trials are actively recruiting patients1,
yet estimates put the rate of participation as low as three percent of
potential trial candidates.2 Deep Lens’ VIPER platform
enables the pathologist in clinical trial recruitment. By identifying
eligible patients at the time of their diagnosis, much sooner than
current methods, VIPER can help fast-track trial enrollment and
potentially shorten the duration of the trial.
“Northpond is excited to support Deep Lens. The VIPER platform and its
unique distribution is a novel approach to the problem of patient
recruitment in clinical trials,” said Michael P. Rubin, M.D., Ph.D.,
founder and CEO at Northpond. “We are proud to begin working with the
current investors to help Deep Lens accomplish their clinical and
commercial goals.”
About Deep Lens
Deep Lens has extended one of the world’s first digital pathology cloud
platforms, VIPER, to include artificial intelligence, enhanced pathology
workflow support and collaboration capabilities. In addition to
providing essential workflow support to pathology teams, Deep Lens
offers the most precise and timely source for identifying sites and
patients for sponsored clinical trials. For more information, visit https://www.deeplens.ai/.
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i https://clinicaltrials.gov,
Last accessed February 28, 2019
ii https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/NBK50895/
Contacts
Media Contact:
Jessica Yingling, Ph.D., President, Little
Dog Communications Inc.
jessica@litldog.com,
+1.858.344.8091