Alongside raising $220 million in new venture capital, digital healthcare mapmaker Komodo Health has charted a partnership with Johnson & Johnson’s pharmaceutical wing, Janssen Research & Development, to help provide real-world data and artificial intelligence-powered analysis.
Komodo’s database traces the healthcare journeys of more than 325 million patients as they receive tests, undergo treatments and respond to therapies to provide a large, anonymized resource for biopharma research.
The collaboration with Janssen will focus on exploring the feasibility of new clinical trials, while also plotting a course for the company’s site selection and patient recruitment.
This month Janssen relied on real-world data to help make the case for its Uptravi (selexipag) therapy for pulmonary arterial hypertension, showing that about three-quarters of treated patients maintained or reduced their risk assessment scores despite the progressive disease.
Meanwhile, Komodo signed an acquisition deal earlier this year for Mavens, a cloud software developer for specialty biotech and pharma companies, as well as a multi-year data sharing agreement with Blue Health Intelligence, to integrate the latter’s longitudinal dataset of commercial medical and pharmacy claims culled from insurers, universities and other sources.
More recently, Komodo announced a $220 million series E financing round, led by Tiger Global Management with additional backing from Casdin Capital, ICONIQ Growth, Andreessen Horowitz and SVB Capital. Those proceeds will help further scale up its core data assets and boost the growth of its enterprise real-world data platform.
“As long-time investors in the intersection of life sciences and next-generation technologies, it was quickly clear to us the scale advantage and impact potential of Komodo Health,” Eli Casdin, founder of Casdin Capital, said in a statement. “They are already far ahead of legacy aggregators and increasingly becoming a leading partner in helping accelerate top pharma and emerging biotechnology companies’ novel therapies to market.”