Six Israeli startups selected to participate in BeyondBio SCALE program

Six startup companies have been selected to participate in the BeyondBio SCALE program led by the British-Swedish global pharmaceutical giant AstraZeneca, the international consulting giant Accenture, the cloud infrastructure leader AWS and Clalit - the largest healthcare organization in Israel.

This will be the third cohort of the program since AstraZeneca BeyondBio Hub was launched, following an agreement between the pharma giant and the Israeli government.

The program is expected to last about nine months with the aim of helping Israeli startups in the fields of digital health and artificial intelligence to successfully navigate the challenging journey from startup to scaleup. The program focuses on providing expert support to the startups, with the aim of helping them develop their markets and deploy their solutions both in the healthcare system in Israel, and on a global scale.

BeyondBio.

As part of the program, interdisciplinary teams from the program partners will be tailored for supporting each startup, and they will provide the startups with the tools and business skills needed to accelerate the process of bringing innovation to patients and the key players in global health systems.

The BeyondBio SCALE program was launched last July with a published call for action for relevant startups to apply to the program. Dozens of startup companies submitted applications. Out of all applicants, six Israeli startups were selected to join the program which is expected to last until July 2023.

Pangea Biomed - improving the personalization of cancer treatments

ENLIGHT, the platform developed by the company, uses machine learning and the analysis of information from the RNA of cancerous tumors, with the aim of matching each patient with the most accurate, safe and effective program for them. The system predicts the response of more than a hundred known drugs on dozens of different tumor types - and has already shown successful results in the treatment of patients who would not have received personalized treatment without it.

Curesponse - a next generation personalized oncology drug scoring and prioritization platform

Curesponse's cResponse platform combines rapid next generation genetic sequencing (NGS) with an AI enabled functional test: a proprietary lab assay, originally developed at the Weizmann Institute, that maintains tissue samples viable for over a week, while preserving functional tumor microenvironment (TME). This combination enables cResponse to offer patients, oncologists, and pharma partners an empirical test that simultaneously scores up to 10 different drugs/drug combinations efficacy on an individual tumor, within 2 weeks, across the full therapeutic modality spectrum (e.g., chemo, targeted biologics, Immunotherapy).

Quris.ai – artificial intelligence for predicting the degree of safety of various medicines

Drug safety is a major unaddressed problem. A staggering 89% of all drugs fail in clinical trials, despite ’successfully’ passing animal testing, costing pharma companies over $53B each year.

Quris has developed a Bio-AI prediction platform, which tests drug's safety in a three-tiered process: Generate>Train>Predict. First, Quris Generates millions of interactions between known drugs and patients-on-chip (miniaturized interconnected human organs on a chip). Then, Quris Trains the AI, based on the proprietary auto-labelled nano-sensor data extracted from these interactions. Last, Quris' platform can accurately predict the safety and personalization of new drug candidates. Quris has a pilot collaboration agreement with Merck and is looking to for additional cooperation opportunities

QuantHealth – clinical trial simulation for drug development optimization

The company's solution enables pharma and biotech companies to execute thousands of clinical trials within minutes, and to find the optimal protocol for the investigational drug. The artificial intelligence platform created by the company crosses over a trillion data points from various sources in the medical and pharmaceutical worlds, including data of 350M patients and 700K drugs and molecules. The platform predicts patient response to drugs that they may have never received. In this way, QuantHealth holistically simulates clinical trials in a virtual form to solve the $45B problem of failed clinical trials at its source.

Rhino Health - Accelerating Healthcare AI Using Privacy Preserving Compute

The Rhino Health platform allows Artificial Intelligence (AI) developers and researchers to implement data collaborations without sharing data or compromising data privacy. It is powered by Federated Learning and edge compute technologies, and uniquely adapted to deal with 'Real World Data'. With advanced approaches, AI models can quickly and continuously improve - learning from each new dataset and applying those learnings to the next. This accelerates delivery of better AI models that work consistently across different patient populations and leads to a more widespread adoption of healthcare AI.

Lynx.MD – convenient and secure sharing of medical data for research purposes

Effective sharing of medical data greatly helps researchers improve and refine their work, in data studies of various types that are constantly being carried out around the world. In this context, Lynx offers a secure platform for sharing medical data, with the aim of accelerating research and medical developments. Today, the company already provides its services to Clalit Health Services and has recently won a tender to work with the Israeli Ministry of Health.

“This partnership with AZ in Israel continues to be a good representation of Accenture’s focus on technology innovation in Life Sciences and the importance of the Israeli ecosystem in this story,” said Shimon Elkabetz, Country Director, Accenture Israel. “This cohort has some disruptive solutions that have the potential to make a huge impact for patients and we look forward to working together with the partners of this program to support the scaling of these solutions globally."

Ohad Goldberg CEO of AstraZeneca Israel: "We, at AstraZeneca, see a great importance in the development, encouragement and growth of local Israeli startup companies in the field of digital health and artificial intelligence. We are committed to support this through the activities of our BeyondBio Innovation Hub in Israel, through several different pathways: via AION Labs - focusing on venture creation to advance global pharma R&D challenges, and our BeyondBio SCALE program supporting advanced innovation solutions reaching deployment at scale. This is the third year in which BeyondBio, AstraZeneca's innovation hub in Israel, leads this startup collaboration program together with leading partners in the healthcare industry, and we are happy to see the results of the previous cohorts of the program leading to significant collaborations between the startups, the program partners and health systems in Israel and around the world.”