The funding round was led by QVentures with participation from Episode1 and industry angels.

Clinical trials follow an initial design process that depends on an estimate of how big the treatment effect is anticipated to be. There is often a substantial gap between the estimated and actual size of the real treatment effect meaning that trials are either too long and over costly or potentially too short thereby resulting in a failed trial despite plausible underlying efficacy signals.

Presentient Technologies is building the Meristem platform, providing pharmaceutical and drug development companies with real-time and predictive analytics on how clinical trials are progressing. This will generate opportunities for sponsors to react appropriately as their trials progress.

Meristem has the ability to flag when trials should be stopped if they're not meeting safety parameters or unlikely to be successful enough to proceed to the next stage. Additionally, Meristem’s accurate outcome predictions can be used to make more effective decisions about streamlining the wider drug development programme.

The Meristem platform also uses proprietary clustering techniques to dive deep into information-rich data like bloodwork and can extract actionable insights which are currently inaccessible by any other method.

For example, Meristem can solve challenging problems such as low-bias cluster analysis on complete patient-level data. When patients are clustered by functional characteristics, trial outcomes can be quickly and accurately projected from quarterly live trial data to help inform decision-making.

Presentient Technologies co-founders Dr Tom Coates and Professor Dr Dan Nicolau have extensive experience in clinical trial design, execution and analytics; and can draw on their wider backgrounds in engineering, drug commercialisation and random matrix theory in mathematics.

“Clinical trials are to medicine what elections are to democracy; they are the definitive process behind every significant step forwards and how we reason about what is effective and safe and what is not.

“Each new drug or surgical procedure passes through clinical trials before it can be adopted but over time clinical trials have been getting more expensive and slower, which is pushing the price of new medicines out of reach for many. Presentient’s vision is a world where the clinical trials process still generates robust evidence but becomes faster and cheaper - bringing better medicines, earlier, to those in need. 

“We are honoured to have the support of QVentures as a partner on our journey into the clinical trials industry. Their investment is enabling us to develop our Meristem platform into a credible set of tools that we hope will be adopted in trials around the world.”

Harveer Bharaj, Principal at QVentures says: “We are excited to be backing Dan and Tom in launching Presentient and its analytics platform, Meristem to market, making clinical trials both safer and more efficient. We’ve already seen their incredible impact during COVID-19 and QVentures believes their platform will save thousands of lives by accelerating traditional clinical trial approaches.”

Adrian Lloyd, Partner at Episode1, adds: “We are excited by the early indications of the efficacy of Presentient’s models having a material impact on the cost of pharma trials - a massive market that of course does hugely valuable work.  If they can get effective drugs to market faster (and stop ineffective drugs using up time and capital), then Presentient will be a hugely meaningful company over the next decades.”