Iterative Scopes closed on a $30 million Series A round. It was led by new investor Obvious Ventures, with participation from Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Breyer Capital and Seae Ventures, in addition to Lee Shapiro, Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner.
Iterative Scopes, based in Cambridge, Mass., closed on a $30 million Series A round. It was led by new investor Obvious Ventures, with participation from Eli Lilly, Johnson & Johnson Innovation – JJDC, Breyer Capital and Seae Ventures, in addition to Lee Shapiro, Zach Weinberg and Nat Turner.
Iterative Scopes is focused on computational gastroenterology, which is to say the use of artificial intelligence (AI) to support clinical and biopharma companies in the areas of gastroenterology, such as inflammatory bowel disease (IBD).
The company notes, for example, that clinical trials for IBD are even more expensive and time-consuming than most trials, with manual centralized endoscopy readings standard, but highly dependent on the readings and skills of the people giving the procedure. It’s also used to score disease severity for ulcerative colitis and Crohn’s disease. The company’s proprietary software automates interpretation of colonoscopy imaging in real time.
The funds raised are going to be used to continuing expanding its core algorithmic innovations and its life sciences businesses.
An earlier seed finding was worth $13.5 million, with investors including Wavemaker Partners, Tau Ventures, Micron Ventures, P5 Health Venters, Time BioVentures, Valor Capital Group, and Wavemaker 360.
Iterative Scopes was spun out of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2017 by Jonathan Ng, now chief executive officer.
“Our vision is to transform gastroenterology by augmenting the physician’s decision making through integration of computer vision algorithms into the everyday clinical workflow,” Ng said. “These technologies have the potential for biopharmaceutical companies to solve some of the most vexing challenges of GI clinical trials. We believe that the most successful healthcare technologies will be able to connect the dots between patient, provider, payer and pharma, and we are excited to be at the very forefront of this movement in gastroenterology.”
The company has two initial technology applications. The first is SKOUT, used for polyp detection. It has an exclusive AI-partnership with ProVation, a provider of GI endoscopy report writer services. That deal was inked in March 2021. The first initiative under the partnership was an AI-based patient recruiting solution for IBD patients into clinical trials.
“Our partnership with Iterative Scopes is a logical one,” said Craig Moriarty, Provation senior vice president of Strategy and Product in a March statement. “Provation is the market leader in GI documentation, with more than 3,500 customer facilities including 80% of the top academic and large health systems.”
The second opportunity is to help biopharma companies speed clinical trials. In IBD studies, inclusion is largely based on disease severity scoring systems such as the Mayo Endoscopic Score (MES). Those scoring systems are also used as primary and secondary endpoints in clinical studies for drug development. As mentioned earlier, these can be subjective and they also present recruitment challenges as well as inefficient workflows. The company’s algorithms allow physicians to use colonoscopy images that already exist to determine if they are eligible for clinical studies. It also is working on technology that automates interpretation of colonoscopy videos and acquiring MES scores for individual patients.
As part of the financing, Eli Lilly not only picked up an equity stake in the company, but has started using Iterative’s software to help in patient selection and evaluation during clinical trials. Lotus Mallbris, Lilly’s vice president of Immunology Development, is joining Iterative’s board of directors.
“Iterative Scopes has an interlocking portfolio of talented people, great ideas, solid results, promising alliances and an advisory board of outstanding experts,” Mallbris says. “We are confident that we will be able to use what is being built here to improve efficiency of how we conduct clinical trials, which may allow much-needed medicines to get to our patients faster.”
Nan Li, managing director of Obvious Ventures, is also joining Iterative’s board of directors.
