Funding Opportunity
£7m priced round
The funds will be used to:
- Create sales and marketing function to bolster revenue-generating activities with the goal of increasing # of new commercial partnerships, # of projects-per-partner, and # of repeat/follow-on business.
- Expand the product team to improve functionality, performance, and usability of the FarrSight® platform. This will allow the platform to offer all Concr offers via a single space, whilst building the requisites to support large number of users to increase recurring revenue.
- Scale business operations to support the above, and ongoing compliance activities.
£7M
Series A
Overview
Concr is a mission-driven techbio company that uses established methods from astrophysics to accurately predict patient outcomes and treatment response to novel and existing cancer therapies. Their unique approach allows iterative learning between disparate and fragmented data across all stages of a drug’s journey into the clinic, removing the need for ‘big data’ and yielding most accurate multi-modal tumour models.
The Challenge
Developing cancer therapies is a costly ($2.8bn to bring a drug to market), and a high risk (97% early failure rate) process, leading to limited efficacy. The biomarkers currently used in clinic poorly predict and segment response in a patient population (only 3 single-gene biomarkers for 44% of all cancer drugs) leading to low response rates and high toxicity.
The data required to bring life-saving therapies to market is disparate and siloed, and existing methods require large volumes to make up for the poorly verified modelling and analysis approaches, creating the need for ‘big data’ methods. Concr has developed and commercialised a novel ‘small data analysis’ method to integrate multi omic data, even at low volumes and with missing data points, to accelerate IND submissions and de-risk clinical trials.
The Solution
Concr evolved established algorithms from astrophysics to overcome the challenge of disparate data integration, yielding a powerful technology for accurate prediction of patient response to emerging and approved cancer treatments, requiring 300x less pre-clinical and 7x less clinical data. Concr’s unique machine learning framework provides insights ranging from zero-shot pre-clinical analysis, and in-silico simulation, to patient stratification for clinical trials, all delivered via a cloud-native FarrSight® platform that allows R&D scientists to manage their data and directly perform a wide array of analyses that traditionally require a bioinformatician.
Patents and Publications
Management Team
Dr Irina Babina | CEO
Dr Irina Babina (PhD, MBA) leverages diverse research and innovation expertise to provide visionary leadership and strategic direction to Concr as its CEO. She brings a rounded knowledge and first-hand experience of developing healthcare innovations and bringing them to market through her tenures in academia, NHS, start-ups, pharma and venture capital.
Dr Matthew Griffiths | CTO & Co-Founder
Dr Matthew Griffiths (PhD) leads the development of Concr’s technology, managing the strategy, algorithmic development, model and data integration, and collaborations with computational research partners.
Matthew has extensive experience developing a wide range of novel computational methods to solve a range of problems, ranging from biophysical simulations of cells and molecular similarity algorithms to advanced Bayesian and Monte Carlo simulation algorithms.
Dr Uzma Asghar | CSO & Co-Founder
Dr Uzma Asghar (MBBS, MRCP, PhD) has dual roles as Chief Scientific Officer at Concr and a practising Consultant Medical Oncologist in the NHS (Royal Marsden Hospital and Croydon University Hospital) with a strong interest in breast cancer and other solid tumour types. She trained in North London (University College London, Royal Free Hospital and North Middlesex Hospital), completed her PhD at Breast Cancer Now, Institute of Cancer Research as a Doctor Avon Fellow and gained clinical trial experience at the NIHR UCLH Clinical Research Facility.
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