On Monday, Unlearn.AI announced the closing of a $12 million Series A funding round. 8VC led the funding round with participation from Unlearn’s existing investors.
Unlearn.AI is a San Francisco-based startup that is using machine learning in clinical trials. Clinical trials are an important step in the drug approval process. Before a drug or treatment hits the market, the company behind it must run clinical trials to ensure the drug is safe and effective.
Clinical trials use real people, and, when testing for a drug that treats a specific disease, that means using real people with a specific medical condition. But it can be a challenge to find people that fit this bill and are willing to participate, which creates a bottleneck for the whole drug approval process.
Unlearn.AI hopes to solve this problem. The company’s platform processes clinical trial data sets from thousands of patients to create machine learning models for specific diseases. It then uses these to create “digital twins” — identical records of the patients in the study that can be used as a control group.
“Unlearn’s pioneering use of Digital Twins will limit the number of patients that need to go on placebo while also reducing overall trial enrollment time,” Unlearn.AI board member and 8VC principal Dr. Francisco Gimenez said in a statement. “As investors at the intersection of healthcare and technology, we’re passionate about companies that pair cutting-edge computational techniques and innovative business models to meaningfully improve patient care. 8VC is excited to partner with Unlearn to bring about the biggest change in the drug approval process since the RCT.”
Unlearn has already applied this model to clinical trials for Alzheimer’s disease. As a result, these trials were able to move forward quicker without the need to find as many control patients.
The new Series A funding will help the company apply its unique approach to more clinical trials.
“Clinical trials are facing a number of persistent challenges that have only been exacerbated in recent weeks,” Dr. Charles K. Fisher, the company’s founder and CEO, said in a statement. “With support from our forward-thinking investors and industry partners, we are excited to continue growing our exceptional team and advancing the science behind our first-of-its-kind Digital Twin approach.”
