Accenture (NYSE: ACN) announced it has made a strategic investment, through Accenture Ventures, in QuantHealth, an AI-powered clinical trial design company that simulates clinical trials in the cloud, allowing pharmaceutical and biotech companies to more quickly and cost-effectively develop treatments for patients.

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Accenture announced it has made a strategic investment, through Accenture Ventures, in QuantHealth, an AI-powered clinical trial design company that simulates clinical trials in the cloud, allowing pharmaceutical and biotech companies to more quickly and cost-effectively develop treatments for patients. (Photo: Business Wire)

With proprietary AI technology trained on a massive dataset of 350 million patients, large biomedical knowledge-graphs, and clinical trial data, QuantHealth’s simulation platform can predict trial outcomes with significant accuracy. It can test thousands of protocol variations and discover the optimal trial design for success, helping research and development (R&D) teams more accurately and rapidly predict clinical trial results and decide whether a trial should proceed, how to optimize cohorts, whether drugs can be repurposed, and other crucial factors.

“QuantHealth’s clinical trial simulation platform can fast-track clinical trials and help pharmaceutical and biotech companies bring life-saving treatments to patients” said Tom Lounibos, global lead of Accenture Ventures. “By accelerating and enhancing global drug discovery efforts, we’ll aim to work alongside QuantHealth, our clients and ecosystem partners to expand medicine and treatment options and find new opportunities to bolster patient care.”

Clinical trials can cost billions of dollars to execute, with only 10% of drugs making it to market. Each year, trial failures collectively cost companies billions of dollars in losses, representing an estimated 20% of the global pharmaceutical R&D budget. Drug population and drug protocol fit account for nearly 75% of these failures. By simulating trials at scale, QuantHealth’s platform can lower risks, expedite, and optimize drug development. QuantHealth is already working with several global pharmaceutical companies to use its product in clinical trial design and development.

Petra Jantzer, Ph.D., global lead of the Accenture Life Sciences business, said, "Through our investment in QuantHealth, we are further solidifying our commitment to utilizing advanced technologies to bring revolutionary change in the pharmaceutical industry. With the aid of AI-designed clinical trial simulations, we can reduce the cost and duration of creating effective medications, which is crucial for improving health outcomes."

“Clinical trials are a costly and uncertain process, where the R&D cost of a new drug can be upwards of $1 billion,” said Orr Inbar, co-founder and CEO of QuantHealth. “QuantHealth has created a solution that uses AI to transform how pharmaceutical companies approach their clinical trials. We’re able to seamlessly integrate data and cloud technology into the clinical trial process, not only saving time and money for pharmaceutical companies, but also increasing the chance of success in drug development. Accenture’s long-standing experience in this industry and leadership in data and AI will help us continue to scale our platform globally.”

QuantHealth is the latest company to join Accenture Ventures’ Project Spotlight, an engagement and investment program focused on working with companies that create or apply disruptive enterprise technologies. Project Spotlight offers extensive access to Accenture’s domain expertise and its enterprise clients, helping startups harness creativity and deliver on the promise of their technology. Additional digital simulation companies in Project Spotlight include Virtonomy and Ocean Genomics.

Terms of the investment were not disclosed.

About Accenture

Accenture is a leading global professional services company that helps the world’s leading businesses, governments and other organizations build their digital core, optimize their operations, accelerate revenue growth and enhance citizen services—creating tangible value at speed and scale. We are a talent- and innovation-led company with approximately 743,000 people serving clients in more than 120 countries. Technology is at the core of change today, and we are one of the world’s leaders in helping drive that change, with strong ecosystem relationships. We combine our strength in technology and leadership in cloud, data and AI with unmatched industry experience, functional expertise and global delivery capability. We are uniquely able to deliver tangible outcomes because of our broad range of services, solutions and assets across Strategy & Consulting, Technology, Operations, Industry X and Song. These capabilities, together with our culture of shared success and commitment to creating 360° value, enable us to help our clients reinvent and build trusted, lasting relationships. We measure our success by the 360° value we create for our clients, each other, our shareholders, partners and communities. Visit us at www.accenture.com.

About QuantHealth

90% of drugs fail the clinical stage, representing a direct $50B annual waste to pharma companies. To address this challenge at its core, QuantHealth's Clinical-Simulator predicts how each patient in a clinical trial will respond to treatment, allowing trial design teams to predict how an entire clinical trial will play out, and optimize trial design. Based on its novel AI engine and a vast dataset of 350m patients and over 700K therapeutics, QuantHealth's simulator can predict clinical trial results with 86% accuracy, allowing users to answer mission critical questions such as cohort optimization, indication selection, in-licensing asset evaluation, and more. QuantHealth was founded by healthcare experts who led commercial, product, and data science at various leading companies in the US and Israel. QuantHealth is backed by expert Life-Science investors in the US, Europe and Israel, and is supported by an advisory board of physicians and scientists from leading academic institutions.

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