The artificial intelligence (AI) driven digital pathology company will use the funding from the Series A financing round to expand its AI capabilities for clinical trial recruitment. It will also scale its service, sales, and marketing organizations to support current and anticipated growth.
Northpond Ventures led the financing round while existing investors Rev1 Ventures, Sierra Ventures, and Tamarind-Hill Partners also participated. Total funding to date totals $17.5m (€15.52m).
Deep Lens’ virtual imaging for pathology and education and research platform known as Viper, will be bolstered through the funding. In the past year, Deep Lens has been able to make Viper free-of-charge to pathology groups worldwide as a way to enable greater patient identification.
A spokesperson for Deep Lens told us, “Pathology is at the beginning of a patients journey and it is extremely important that the diagnosis is accurate and can lead to more precise trials and opportunities for more rapid trial identification.”
Viper uses AI with pathology workflows while establishing collaboration and patient identification for clinical trials which can be costly and time-intensive. Deep Lens’ platform can be used to identify eligible patients at the time of diagnosis, fast-tracking patient trial enrollment.
Deep Lens stated that this AI-driven pathology approach includes identification of eligible patients and creates an opportunity to embed two disciplines into the clinical workflow: clinical trial operations with AI insight and quality with the end goal of optimizing recruitment and treatment patterns.
The Deep Lens spokesperson added, “The AI methods, in coordination with the Viper platform, enable patients to be identified at the point of confirmed diagnosis and based on pre-clinical AI methods aimed to associate patients with the best trial and prognostic outcome.”
Viper was previously used in an alliance with the contract research organization (CRO) Worldwide Clinical Trials to enhance patient recruitment. At the time, Dave Bowser, executive vice president and general manager of the global clinical development division at Worldwide Clinical Trials, told us that using real-time diagnosis to alert the patient to research and care teams was integral in trial participation.
“Going straight to the source can fast-track trial enrollment and potentially shorten the duration of the trial, and most importantly, expeditiously get treatment options patients in critical need,” Bowser said.