The ways in which treatments and medications get developed are as important as the end results themselves. Excessive costs incurred in the production of new advances can result in less options being pursued, and cause the proliferation of new treatments to atrophy.

Companies using the most innovative avenues for research and development are likely to be the ones that will blaze new trails in the ways drugs enter the market, and will probably be the ones responsible for the new vanguard of therapies.

Below, are two healthcare startups employing the latest advancements in computer science to surmount some of the obstacles that breed inefficiency in the drug development process. Both are the very definition of meaningful digital transformation in healthcare

Verge Genomics

This is a healthcare startup worth keeping an eye on! One of the biggest obstacles impeding the advancement of medical research is the glacial rate of the medical trial process. Not a year goes by that billions aren’t lost on exploring drugs that don’t end up delivering. In fact, it’s believed that the cumulative cost of getting a new drug on the market is 1.3 billion dollars.

Created by Jason Chen and Alice Zhang, Verge Genomics has developed a novel method that integrates the assistance of artificial intelligence to correctly predict which drugs have a lower possibility of making it through the entire process. In this way, companies are better able to know which treatments are worth directing funding towards, thereby unnecessary spending on potential failures and reducing the costs of treatments for patients.

Healx

Startup, Healx, devises cutting-edge treatments and medications with the assistance of artificial intelligence that allows them to analyze the entirety of the existing ecosystem of available drugs to determine if any of them have properties that could be leveraged to fight rare diseases.  

Healx’s technologies proved their mettle when they were able to come up with a treatment for Fragile-X in under a year and a half. This speed greatly outpaced historic time-frames for drug development.

At times, it has taken Healx’s drugs almost 80{d3c60023947365f0952b5035a9683a235cbc7c14337ea22b03cb0529785b7564} less time than the industry average to arrive at the clinical trial phase, demonstrating how truly innovative the startup is.

Additionally, the own HealNet, a highly-sophisticated database of rare diseases, which the company claims includes more than a billion distinct, documented results of treatments for rare diseases.

Conclusion

Both of these companies are using leading methods of meta-analysis to cut out the tedium and guesswork involved drug development, and the world will surely reap the benefits.