nference, a new emerging company in the field of AI-powered life sciences, has raised $11 million in a series A funding round successfully led by Matrix Partners, with participation from existing investor Matrix Capital Management. The accumulated funds will be utilised for further development of the company’s AI and R&D platforms, expand scientific operations in Cambridge, MA, US, and establish nference Labs in Bangalore, India.
The research team at nference includes successful serial tech entrepreneurs and leading clinical, data and research scientists trained at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) and Harvard Medical School, who work closely with partners from the pharmaceutical sector to address some of the biggest challenges in drug discovery and clinical research.
This includes the identification of emerging targets and signalling pathways for disease processes with unmet need, stratification of patients in clinical trials, and prioritisation of life-cycle opportunities for drugs in development. The company’s AI platform lies at the centre of the aforementioned collaborations, which plays an important role in augmenting the scientists’ abilities to generate holistic data-driven and unbiased hypotheses in a rapid manner.
Diego Miralles, M.D., scientific advisor to nference and former head of Johnson 6& Johnson Innovation, said: “The nference AI technology is enabling an important step forward in digitising biology. nference’s approach reimagines big pharma R&D by enabling entirely novel hypotheses to emerge from the triangulation of insights across traditionally siloed structured databases and unstructured text documents. This powerful platform establishes nference as a leader in the ongoing development of AI-powered drug discovery.”
As this publication reported earlier this month, Samsung partnered with Babylon Health in order to provide medical consultations to its smartphone users through ‘GP at hand’ service. Samsung will integrate Babylon’s Health service into its Samsung health app on compatible Galaxy devices. Users will be charged a subscription fee if they intend to use the service.
