Atropos Health, a startup company providing physicians with real-world evidence at the point of care, has received a $14 million Series A funding round and named a chief executive officer.
Palo Alto, Calif.-based Atropos began as a research project at Stanford Medicine in 2011. The “Green Button” concept aimed to answer the question: What if pressing a virtual button could trigger a search of millions of similar, anonymized electronic records to instantly aggregate data to inform patient care?
The concept grew into a research project called the Clinical Informatics Consult service, with a proof of concept built at Stanford Health Care. Upon the successful completion of the pilot, Saurabh Gombar, Nigam Shah, and Brigham Hyde founded Atropos Health in late 2020 to democratize access to real-world evidence. It completed a seed funding round in the fall of 2020, by a group of institutional and individual investors including the Boston Millennia Founders Fund.
In 2021, Stanford Health Care partnered with Atropos to support clinical decision-making across its more than 2,000 affiliated physicians.
The company said it would use the Series A funding to expand its commercial team, further build on recent market traction, and continue to develop its oncology product. Breyer Capital, a venture capital investor, led the round with participation from Emerson Collective, a multi-stage venture team. Other participating investors include Boston Millennia Partners.
Current President, Neil Sanghavi, and Chief Medical Officer Saurabh Gombar, M.D./Ph.D., will remain in their current roles. Co-founder Nigam Shah, M.D./Ph.D., recently appointed Chief Data Scientist at Stanford University, will remain on the board.
Atropos co-founder Brigham Hyde, Ph.D., who helped oversee the funding deal, has been named the company’s CEO. Hyde has a track record of building businesses in the health tech and real-world data (RWD) space and most recently served as president of data and analytics at Eversana. Prior to that role, Hyde served as a healthcare partner at the AI venture fund Symphony AI, where he led the investment in, co-founded, and operated Concert AI, an oncology RWD company – most recently valued at $1.9 billion.
Earlier this year the American Society of Clinical Oncology’s CancerLinQ announced it was partnering with Atropos Health in an effort to provide oncology clinicians with the latest real-world evidence available to help inform personalized care and treatment of an individual patient.
Atropos Health and CancerLinQ are working together to provide a “digital consult” to pressing clinical questions that are important in tailoring treatment decisions. Participating clinicians on the CancerLinQ platform will be able to request an on-demand analysis of millions of aggregated de-identified records of similar patient cases and outcomes, which will be delivered within days in the form of a “Prognostogram” report, leveraging best-in-class, peer-reviewed observational research methodologies.
CancerLinQ is a real-world oncology data platform developed by ASCO that collects and aggregates longitudinal electronic health record data from oncology practices throughout the United States. CancerLinQ improves the quality of patient care and accelerates discovery by securely compiling, harmonizing, analyzing, and de-identifying vast amounts of information on patient characteristics (e.g., molecular profiles, comorbidities), treatments, and long-term side effects.
