What You Should Know:
– ArcaScience, a Paris, France-based AI Healthtech startup, has announced a $7M seed funding round led by The Moon Venture, with participation from Pléiade Venture, Plug&Play Ventures, Bpifrance, and AKKA Technologies. This marks the company’s first institutional funding round, following a €1.3 million pre-seed raise.
– The new funds will be used to expand operations in the U.S. and U.K., launch the company’s first patient-facing solution, and strategically recruit a Chief Medical Officer. The initial focus for the patient-facing solution will be on pediatric brain cancer and dermatological diseases.
Evaluating The Benefit-Risk Profile of New Drugs
ArcaScience was born out of founder Romain Clement’s personal experience with brain cancer. After his remission, he set out to address the blind spots in how pharmaceutical companies evaluate the benefit-risk profile of new drugs. Founded to address this critical bottleneck in drug development, ArcaScience has pioneered the use of AI to improve benefit-risk assessments for pharmaceuticals and regulators, empowering both clinical teams and patients.
The company’s CEO, Romain Clement, stated that it takes more than 10 years to bring a drug to market, with a 90% failure rate and an average cost of $2.3 billion for a drug that succeeds. He noted that this funding will help ArcaScience scale its product and bring “real benefit-risk clarity to both the pharma industry and patients”.
Global Traction and Strategic Partnerships
Experts predict that by 2026, 80% of pharmaceutical companies will rely on AI solutions for benefit-risk evaluation. ArcaScience is already seeing traction from this shift, with 10 pharma clients, including Sanofi, AstraZeneca, GSK, Takeda, and ICON. The company is also a member of a new pan-European consortium created by Sanofi and Imagine for Margo that is focused on combating pediatric brain cancer with AI.
ArcaScience’s platform has been used by over 70,000 patients in the area of chronic skin diseases and is being adopted by clinical operations and pharmacovigilance leaders to derisk clinical trials and optimize drug development. The company was also selected by the French government during the COVID-19 crisis to structure and deliver the complete corpus of scientific knowledge on the virus, which is a testament to the platform’s robustness and reliability. The company’s proprietary platform combines 24 highly specialized AI models with a single database of 100 billion health data.
