HealthTech company Raremark has raised £3m from investors.
The round was led by AlbionVC and Ananda Ventures, with participation from Oltre Venture and from existing major investor the Cass Entrepreneurship Fund.
Julie Walters, CEO and founder of Raremark, commented on the news: “Healthcare is becoming increasingly personalized, and precision medicine is enabling the right treatments to be delivered to the right patients. However, accessing credible and structured, real-w0rld patient data remains one of the most acute challenges facing drug development in rare disease.”
Lennart Hergel, partner at Ananda Ventures, explained Raremark’s approach: “Raremark has built a technology platform using content algorithms to boost engagement and advanced data analytics to understand the mechanisms, symptoms and heterogeneity of rare diseases. The resulting high-quality insights will enable companies to develop more effective treatments that are tailored to patients’ profiles.”
Dr Christoph Ruedig, partner at AlbionVC, went on to add: “The low prevalence of rare diseases throws up some unique challenges. The paucity of clinical experience and data leads to poor trial design, making it more difficult to demonstrate an acceptable efficacy and safety profile for a drug, delaying or even preventing it from reaching the market.”
The cash will be used to develop Raremark’s patient-engagement and data-analysis technology, which seeks to help biopharmaceutical companies to identify, engage and learn from patients, in a bid to accelerate the development of new treatments.
Commenting on the value proposition to the biopharmaceutical industry, Helen Reynolds, investment director at the Cass Entrepreneurship Fund, concluded: “Raremark gets to the root of the problems familiar to all pharmaceutical companies, by boosting the quality of trials and improving drug development with data-driven intelligence. We are very excited about the company’s potential to transform rare disease treatments.”