Bringing a new drug to market can cost in the range of $1 billion. That’s a hefty R&D price tag so Intelligencia is attempting to use artificial intelligence to assess historical clinical trial data to inform pipeline decisions.
Professional services firm ZS knows the difficulty that comes with advising life sciences companies on pipeline and portfolio strategy. So, Evanston, Illinois-based ZS is investing in and partnering with the New York City and Greece startup through a $12 million series A. Healthcare investor MTIP led the financing.
ZS will use Intelligencia’s AI expertise to research diseases and pipeline products for its life sciences clients to make regulatory success predictions. Intelligencia’s database of clinical trial activity is used to assess the likelihood of clinical and regulatory approval. These added capabilities will be critical for ZS’s clients, of which the company claims to have worked with 49 of the 50 largest drugmakers.
The companies claim Intelligencia’s platform is better than in-house algorithms or external benchmarks, the current industry standards for assessing whether a drug will make it through the clinic and into patients. Biopharmas typically look at their own development history or rely on the firsthand experience of their clinical staff, whereas Intelligencia is able to use broader industry data.
Accuracy, reliability and standardization are the key buzzwords Intelligencia used to describe its data set.
“Intelligencia’s richness, history and comprehensiveness of data goes far beyond existing offerings on the market and will immediately impact and improve pipeline development decisions ultimately creating value for the industry,” said Swati Gokhale, ZS’s strategic partnerships leader, in a statement.
Intelligencia’s founders have experience with the services and consulting world. Dimitrios Skaltsas and Vangelis Vergetis met at McKinsey & Company and have spent a decade in the clinical development and data science world.