Dyania Health was founded in 2019 and is led by a seasoned entrepreneurial team, NLP data
scientists, physicians, and serial drug inventors who have worked at some of the US’s top
institutions including UCLA, Harvard Medical School, Northwell Health, and Kite Pharma. The
founders are committed to addressing a significant and unsolved problem for clinical trials: today’s
manual chart review to pre-screen patients for clinical research is antiquated, cumbersome, and
time-consuming. The process to match patients on very specific and time-sensitive clinical trial
criteria typically takes 18 – 24 months for most trials.
Within the oncology field alone, there are approximately two million new patients per year in the US. These patients’ histories are also dynamically changing over time as their diseases progress, often
quickly. Hence, an army of clinical research associates constantly reading ever-changing sets of
EMR files is an impossible feat, and as a result, patients are often never found. Finding a “needle
in a timestack”, within a patient’s window of opportunity, could mean qualification, access, and
potential enrollment in a clinical study for a drug that could be an additional, life-saving care
option for a patient who has exhausted other avenues.
Others have also noted the potential for Artificial Intelligence (A.I.) to aid this process. Today, A.I.
utilized across other application areas is typically a probability-based technology, highly effective
in determining likelihood of a binary outcome like a preference for a movie, a watch, or a pair of
shoes. It also has proven to be effective in determining the likelihood of benign or malignant
diagnoses from medical imaging, often better than a human physician. On the other hand, clinical research criteria, like much of medicine, are prescriptive, complex, and based on a series of
decision trees. A.I. cannot solve this determination in the same way it has been used in other
applications. The HIPAA compliant technology Dyania Health is building takes a prescriptive,
rule-based approach, utilizing in-house medical and scientific expertise to drive optimal clinical research, bring drugs to market faster, improve patient outcomes, and save patient lives.
John Chelico, MD, CMIO of Common Spirit and former CIO of Northwell Health described, “Dyania
Health’s approach to working with large health systems quickly creates a safe IT environment
that unlocks and de-identifies the unstructured patient data from electronic health record
databases. This process will be instrumental in accelerating the throughput of clinical trials
accrual in a safe and compliant way.“
To fuel scale of algorithms and engineering, platform product development, and clinical and pharmaceutical client support, Dyania Health has announced the close of a $5.3 million seed round, led by Innospark Ventures. Also participating in the round were Outsiders Fund, Wild Basin, Big Pi Ventures, and Tau Ventures along with recent investment from Genesis Ventures and TLife Investments. The group of investors notably represents a diverse geographic reach to include Boston, New York, San Francisco, Austin, and Athens, Greece.
Matt Fates, partner at Innospark Ventures and new board member at Dyania Health described his
excitement for the company’s future, “Matching patients with today’s complex and time sensitive
trial criteria, especially within oncology, where rescanning patient records frequently is often
required, is inherently something computers should do better than humans with the proper
training. Dyania has built a robust solution that goes well beyond existing offerings, can decipher
the proper matches down to the most granular level, and can do this on a daily basis, ensuring
no patients are missed. We see tremendous potential to accelerate patient enrollment and
increase the number of successful trials, delivering more new therapies to the right patients
faster.”
Dyania’s founder and CEO, Eirini Schlosser, further added, “We founded the company to bridge
two very different worlds, technology and medicine. Physicians’ knowledge is based on centuries
of experience taught in medical school and residency programs along with defined, modern
standard-of-care protocols. Medicine maintains strict protocol standards that are slow-changing
with little room for deviation or creativity in order to minimize risk to patients. On the other hand,
technological innovation lends itself to a completely opposite philosophy. We are excited to
bridge these worlds and enhance human physician abilities to run clinical research in a compliant manner and to find patients who could benefit most from new therapies under study.”
