Understanding patients worldwide: Using AI to improve drugs

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Why listen to a patient when you can listen to everyone? You can read here how a Bielefeld startup wants to improve the lives of patients worldwide with the help of an AI-based platform and how it is supported in this way.

When the foundation stone was laid for Semalytix, the declared goal was nothing less than to make the world a better place. A noble goal, but by no means unrealistic. “In the last 20 or 30 years, mankind has built the largest patient experience dataset that we have ever owned,” says Janik Jasolski, founder and CEO of the Bielefeld startup Semalytix. “Millions of people share their medical experiences on the Internet without them being systematically evaluated. We want to do this with AI – and thus improve medicine. “

This idea came to Janik Jaskolski and his later co-founders, Philipp Cimiano and Matthias Hartung, while studying cognitive computer science at the CITEC Institute of Bielefeld University. In 2015, they founded Semalytix as a spin-off of the “Semantic Computing Research” project group, which dealt with the AI-supported evaluation of texts and words.

With the help of their specially developed software platform “Pharos”, they are able to collect patient voices from social networks, forums and many other online sources in order to then structure and evaluate them. The goal: to sustainably improve drug development and thus patient experience. The AI-supported, automated data processing makes it possible to better understand patients in their respective situation, to uncover unknown side effects and disease progression and thus to optimize treatments and future generations of drugs.

The platform developed by Semalytix automatically searches online forums and speaks 12 languages. “The AI ​​analyzes anonymized statements in the posts about improvements and effects of the disease, unmet needs, impairments, symptoms and more,” explains Cimiano. “She is trained with data annotated by us and continues to learn and gets better and better.”

In 2020 the team already consisted of over 60 international employees. Their customers today include the top 20 pharmaceutical companies, but the vision is bigger. “We know that there is still an infinite amount of potential to drive data-driven innovations in health care,” says Jaskolski – for example, in order to be able to respond to patient needs that have been neglected or simply unknown. “It’s about improving the quality of life for patients and making it easier for them to cope with their daily challenges.” Because those affected would often tell a different story about how a disease or symptom affects daily life than one Doctor would do that, Jaskolski knows. “Our vision is to make patient information a real performance indicator in drug development.”

The potential behind Semalytix did not go undiscovered for long. After an initial seed round in 2020, it was NRW.BANK that participated in the startup at the beginning of 2021 as part of an extended Series A financing round with an investment of two million euros. “Artificial intelligence is becoming more and more important not only in the health market,” says Michael Stölting, member of the board of directors NRW.BANK. “With Semalytix, pharmaceutical companies are able to derive insights from the global patient experience with drugs. This offers great potential, especially in the current situation – let’s just think of the testing of new vaccines. From our point of view, the company has great growth and scaling potential and fits perfectly into our portfolio Venture Fund. “

“We are very pleased about the investment by NRW.BANK, with which we can further develop our business model and invest in growth,” adds Jaskolski. Thanks in part to the investment by NRW.BANK, Semalytix was able to achieve constant and rapid growth and continue to advance the medical solution for diseases of all kinds.

NRW.BANK is the development bank for North Rhine-Westphalia and supports progress and development – towards an ecologically and socially sustainable, digital and structurally modernized economy and society.

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