St. Louis-based BJC HealthCare has taken the lead in a $6 million investment for CuriMeta, an analytics startup. This collaboration aims to harness deidentified patient data to address diseases such as heart disease, cancer, and neurodegenerative conditions. The funding round saw participation from BJC’s partner, Washington University School of Medicine, also located in St. Louis. Richard Liekweg, the president and CEO of BJC HealthCare, emphasized the organization’s commitment to utilizing this unparalleled data platform to navigate the complex landscape of curing, preventing, and predicting severe or chronic illnesses.
CuriMeta is developing a secure platform to share real-world data sets with life science companies. These datasets will be jointly reviewed and selected by the three collaborating entities. Philip Payne, PhD, the chief data scientist and director of the Institute for Informatics at Washington University School of Medicine, highlighted the potential of such data in discovering new applications for existing drugs. These therapies can then be introduced to the market swiftly and cost-effectively. The collaboration will prioritize patient privacy, partly by employing artificial intelligence to generate “synthetic” data sets. CuriMeta’s vision, as articulated by its founder and CEO Davis Walp, is to bridge the existing gaps in medical science by offering comprehensive, secure, and high-quality health data to researchers.
