A New York City startup launched from stealth mode with $203 million behind it acquired an AI spinoff from Nationwide Children's Hospital to help fix the "broken" system of matching patients with experimental treatments.
Deep Lens Inc. of Columbus joins Paradigm Health Inc. to build technology that improves access to and diversity in clinical trials. With software already on the market, Deep Lens has focused on cancer, while Paradigm is looking across all of healthcare.
"The mission and vision of Paradigm is a perfect match with what we at Deep Lens had set out to accomplish," co-founder and CEO Dave Billiter said in a LinkedIn post. "Paradigm will accelerate and expand on all of those elements. Our platform will be the foundation for the technology of Paradigm."
Paradigm will expand both its staff and office space in Columbus, a spokesman said via email. Executives were not immediately available for comment.
Arch Venture Partners conceived of the startup, and the Series A was led by that VC firm with General Catalyst.
The round is unusually large amid a slowdown of venture investing nationwide. Other participants include F-Prime Capital, GV, LUX Capital, Mubadala Capital, Magnetic Ventures, and strategic investors including the American Cancer Society’s BrightEdge fund. General Catalyst has previously invested in Columbus-based Olive AI Inc. and Circulo.
“The clinical research and drug development process is failing the very people it’s meant to serve,” Paradigm CEO Kent Thoelke said in a news release. "The system is broken, and the human cost of inaction is unacceptable. Paradigm is reimagining the entire drug development paradigm by upending the status quo and focusing on equitable access to clinical research at scale from the start.”
Deep Lens, based at 175 S. 3rd St. off Columbus Commons, actually joined Paradigm last spring, but investors and the startup kept the news under wraps until Friday.
Viper, the Deep Lens software, rapidly analyzes cancer pathology and lab results, a tumor's genetic properties and the patient's medical history to identify relevant clinical trials and personalized treatment options for that type of cancer.
About 15,000 cancer clinical trials are ongoing at any one time, but each study enrolls an estimated 3% of eligible patients, the company has said.
Paradigm aims to overcome barriers to access, which include IT systems that today don't talk to each other between patient records and clinical trial design – especially for patients of community hospitals instead of academic medical centers.
"Clinical research is ready for a reboot," Robert Nelson, Arch managing director who's co-founder and co-chairman of Paradigm.
"Today the system is broken in almost every respect – patient access is too narrow, incentives are misaligned, and poor trial design slows development," he said in the release. "We saw an opportunity to fundamentally rebuild the system and fix the business model."
The release did not disclose the acquisition price.
Founded in 2017, Deep Lens raised a cumulative $17.5 million in venture capital. Its investors included Dublin-based Tamarind Hill and Columbus-based Rev1 Ventures.
In 2021 Dublin healthcare giant Cardinal Health Inc. included Viper in a software bundle offered to oncology practices that see about 80% of U.S. cancer patients.
Billiter was previously director of Children's Biopathology Center Informatics Team and the Informatics Core of its Research Institute. His co-founders are President Simon Arkell, a veteran of predictive analytics software who works from Southern California as the company's West Coast liaison, and T.J. Bowen, a cancer researcher and biotech consultant who is chief science officer.
"Deep Lens did something that is really hard for even investors in that space to understand," said Mark Shary, co-founder and managing partner of Tamarind Hill.
Technology is the only way to find the right matches for a specific trial among a diverse and distributed population, Shary said. Deep Lens with Paradigm ultimately will speed up the release of precision medicine in the market.
"Its infrastructure that allows all the information that needs to happen at the right time be in the right hands," he said. "You have these little windows of time to get these people (into trials)."
