Accenture invests in QuantHealth for drug development

NEW YORK and TEL AVIV, ISRAEL — Outsourcing company Accenture has invested $2 million into clinical trial design firm QuantHealth to accelerate its drug development initiatives.
QuantHealth will funnel the investments into its drug simulation platform, which harnesses artificial intelligence (AI) to treat and analyze its massive 350 million patient data set.
It boasts 86% accuracy in predicting trial outcomes using the binary endpoint metric. Through QuantHealth’s platform, the drug development chain is swift, has less risk, is cost-efficient, and is better optimized.
“Clinical trials are a costly and uncertain process, where the R&D cost of a new drug can be upwards of $1 billion,” said Orr Inbar, co-founder and Chief Executive Officer of QuantHealth.
Less than 10% of these medicines make it to the market. Trial failures account for about $50 billion in losses annually — some 20% of the global pharmaceutical research and development budget. The main causes of these failures are lack of drug-population fit and drug-protocol fit.
The investment was made through Accenture Ventures, the firm’s venture capital arm. QuantHealth will be placed under Accenture Venture’s Project Spotlight – an investment program for emerging technology software startups – where it will gain access to Accenture’s team of experts.
Tom Lounibos, global lead of Accenture Ventures, said: “In addition to accelerating and enhancing global drug discovery efforts, we will work alongside QuantHealth, our clients, and ecosystem partners to expand medicine and treatment options and find new opportunities to bolster patient care.”
Accenture’s investment puts QuantHealth’s Series A funding round at $17 million. In August, the Tel-Aviv-based company received $15 million co-led by Bertelsmann Investments and Pitango HealthTech, with participation from existing investors Shoni Top Ventures and Nina Capital.
Accenture topped the Time Doctor OA500, an index of the world’s top 500 outsourcing firms, with $61.6 billion in annual revenues for fiscal year 2022. The 2024 edition of the OA500 will be released next month.