vinehealth, after obtaining $5,5 million in seed round, is preparing to expand to the United States.
The round, which co-founder and CTO Georgina Kirby co-founded, is the first phase of a Series A planned "in the next 12 to 18 months," led by Talis Capital with participation from previous investors like Playfair Capital and Ascension.
Several individual investors have joined the round, including Keith Gibbs, former CEO of AXA PPP Healthcare; Pam Garside, partner at Newhealth; Voyager Health-Tech Fund, led by David Rowan, founding editor of Wired; David Giampaolo, healthcare entrepreneur and founder of PI Capital; Deepali Nangia, Venture Partner at Speedinvest and Atomico Angel; Faisal Mehmud, vice president and former chief medical officer of Bristol Myers Squibb; and KHP, a collaboration between King's College London, King's College Hospital NHS Foundation Trust and Guy's and St Thomas' NHS Trust.
The startup combines behavioral science and artificial intelligence to offer patient support and support at specific moments (for example, medication reminders) so that they can easily self-manage their treatment.
The vinehealth it also acts as a channel through which physicians can remotely monitor patients while discussing and reporting symptoms and treatment side effects.
So far, the app has been downloaded more than 15.000 times since January 2020, including all features planned to date, both for pure patient support and trials/research.
The Patient Support app is offered free of charge and is currently available in the UK and Ireland.
For the pharmaceutical industry, vinehealth provides the platform as a Software as a Service (SaaS), which helps pharmaceutical companies recruit patients for trials and gather information to help with R&D and drug development.
“We've been focused on the pharmaceutical industry from the beginning and we're building a lot of momentum in it and seeing a lot of opportunities,” says Kirby. “The patient support program and the clinical trial are very compatible… For the pharmaceutical industry, they are different parts of the drug development process, but in terms of software delivery, the things that patients need throughout that process is extremely similar. So we've really narrowed down to that offer."
She confirms that vinehealth it is not going down the path of trying to sell directly to health services. In essence, the idea is that research in the life sciences (pharmaceutical) finances the provision of free support software to patients.
While, for monetization, it focuses on meeting the needs of pharmaceutical companies, vinehealth is equally interested in being seen as patient-centric, and wants its app to play a key role in supporting the clinician and promoting better patient outcomes.
“We have a web dashboard that can be accessed through any browser for clinicians who want to be able to track their patients remotely and do it while running research studies or even within clinical trials,” says Kirby. “Those doctors and nurses can see that data in real time and manually enter additional data when needed; obviously they're not sitting in front of the dashboard all day, but there may be times when it's very useful for them to see specific brands of care and be able to know which patient to see first and also know how to make better clinical decisions using that kind of data more in real time, instead of the typical periodic reviews. This way they have information, a context of each situation and historical vision that they have never had before », she adds.
The premise of vinehealth is to migrate processes to a dedicated, easy-to-use digital interface to support better patient self-management, treatment outcomes, and improved quality of life for people living with cancer, given the relative ease of reporting via an app, combined with broader support than offered by charities (Macmillan and Bowel Cancer UK to provide support content for the app).
For example, Kirby says they use A/B testing and artificial intelligence to set up personalized and timely recommendations and bring to light the appropriate resources, as well as to determine the best way to motivate patients to take medication and manage what may be complex drug regimens for cancer treatment.
Kirby indicates to that when patients track their data effectively, survival rates may increase, by up to 20%. "Better self-management can have a huge impact on survival," he says, adding, "We want to show not only improvements in survival, but also in quality of life."
The focus of vinehealth it comes from the combined experience of the co-founders. «Rayna [Patel; co-founder and CEO] the background is really in behavioral science; mine is in data science,” says Kirby. “So when we come together, we think we can really take advantage of both disciplines and use the data to understand what people are going through and where those supports can be most effective. And using behavioral science to offer those supports at key moments with the right wording that really pushes people to develop habits and be able to feel more in control and be able to really understand what's going on and make better decisions for their own care."
“There are a number of patient supports in the app, some small, some major. We create medication alerts and reminders so that they are administered in a certain way that is really effective and patients do not discard them. We have suggestions for recording certain symptoms and what that leads to, therefore some support content. Anxiety at certain levels is recorded, with supportive content that can really help the patient deal with this particular symptom or side effect of their medication."
"At different times, it's about timing, wording, and delivering that extra support," he adds. “If you try to change too many things at once, research shows that you don't change anything at all, so we've thought very carefully about how we push and how we try to help patients develop better habits and how often we do that.”
Kirby says the goal, over time, is also to use AI to incorporate more advanced suggestions into the platform in the future, such as predictive symptom tracking (ie, "what is likely to happen with this particular drug for this particular patient").
For now, vinehealth has built a specialized oncology content recommendation system personalized for the patient; aligned with your diagnosis, adapting to the continuous contributions that you register and taking into account the content that other similar patients read and find valuable.
On the research side, Kirby says the largest study the platform has been used for to date is an ongoing study involving nine NHS Trusts and 300 patients, and that vinehealth is doing for itself.
“We are planning a series of clinical trials that are a bit larger, but still to be confirmed in terms of exact numbers. The US studios are likely to be the biggest,” he adds.
Health data is, of course, highly sensitive and Kirby confirms that consent for third party research purposes is requested separately from the consent that is required of a user of the patient assistance product in order to vinehealth may process your medical information to provide the service and provide you with personalized treatment support.
“That data is not shared with anyone, unless they have given explicit consent to do so. By registering on the platform, you are not giving your consent to share your data as part of a clinical trial. That is a completely separate consent,” she says.
“We made it extremely clear and we don't want to hide any exchange in any way; it has to be really obvious and very clear to the patient. Everyone wants to support cancer patients. They want to offer more opportunities for patients to participate in clinical trials, to be able to capture the data and feed it back in a way that what they are living alone on a clinical and personal level reaches the pharmaceutical company, for example. We are making it very clear what we are doing and why we are doing it and giving patients the choice to share it or not."
Kirby suggests that, in the future, the startup may also look to be able to provide "properly anonymized" datasets based on purely aggregate information provided by patients, so it could, for example, highlight demographics experiencing side effects. specific to certain medications. However, he adds that that's not something he's doing right now, "given our focus on trials and patient support programs."
Short term, vinehealth is preparing to grow via a US launch, which it expects to happen "early next year," with an 18-member team likely to double over the next six months. The first contract in the United States is already secured.
“The main thing that we've been focused on since we fundraised is hiring a great team and growing that team and investing time in building it and making sure that everyone is aligned with the mission and that we're really building a product that's scalable to be able to take it to these new markets,” says Kirby, adding, “Building a startup is all about having great people. You can have great technology, but if you don't have great people, then you really don't have anything."
Commenting on the seed funding in a statement, Beatrice Aliprandi, director of Talis Capitalsaid: “We are very excited to partner with Rayna and Georgina – we had been keeping a close eye on the growth of vinehealth for several months before investing in the company, given its unique value proposition where healthcare outcomes work in direct correlation to financial results. It's a win-win for patients, hospitals, and pharmaceutical companies, which is rarely the case in the healthcare arena, where parties are often at odds with each other."
“From our first meeting, the resiliency and mission-driven attitude of the founders was immediately clear and is really what made this opportunity so compelling. Both Rayna and Georgina are clearly incredibly driven to improve the lives and survival of cancer patients, and as a team they possess a unique combination of experience, skills and drive to make vinehealth exit ".
