CuriMeta Launches in Collaboration with BJC HealthCare and Washington University in St. Louis to Empower Researchers With Advanced Real-World Health Data

CuriMeta secures Series Seed funding to close research gaps and accelerate development of life saving interventions

ST. LOUIS, Aug. 30, 2022 /PRNewswire/ -- CuriMeta, a life science-focused, real-world health data company, announced a collaboration with BJC HealthCare (BJC) and Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis (WashU Medicine), who also led the $6 Million Series Seed Funding round.

The funding will allow CuriMeta to securely and privately transform, curate, and aggregate real-world health data from a major academic research organization and leading health system to provide researchers with indispensable insights and the evidence required to solve urgent scientific and clinical challenges and improve healthcare for all.

Driven by the belief that health system-sourced data can provide superior depth and insight into patient populations, CuriMeta's medical data experts will analyze, expand, and organize the aggregated data into multiple, secure, privacy-protecting datasets that can be used by researchers to advance our understanding of health and disease and to develop lifesaving cures. By enabling and accelerating the exchange of advanced real-world health data with the research community, CuriMeta will enable life science organizations to accelerate their research and bring new diagnostics and interventions to patients and their care providers. CuriMeta's goal is to accelerate the research aims of both academic and industry researchers and help to fulfill their missions of improving patient care and saving lives.

CuriMeta will also deploy and utilize cutting-edge, privacy-protecting technologies that will allow data contributors, such as health systems, to know when and how the data they share via CuriMeta is being used. In addition, through the use of advanced computational methods, such as the generation of synthetic data using modern AI techniques, CuriMeta will ensure that patient confidentiality is maintained at a level that meets and exceeds current guidelines for the secure and private sharing of health data.

CuriMeta's potential collaborators and partners include health systems and academic medical centers, life science manufacturers, and clinical research organizations, particularly those working in oncology, cardiology, and neurology. CuriMeta will be a vital conduit that will help connect leading, mission-driven health systems and academic medical centers with life-science organizations to pursue ground-breaking research and deliver new diagnostics and therapeutics faster than has been possible in the past.

"We are investing significantly in augmenting and improving the usefulness of the data, not just gathering it," said Davis Walp, CuriMeta Founder and Chief Executive Officer. "Our data experts will curate, harmonize, and apply machine learning techniques to enhance the quality, completeness, and research value of our collaborators' data. This is a team of mission focused industry veterans who understand the pressing scientific and clinical challenges that researchers are solving for. We're aggregating and delivering advanced, real-world health data designed to answer those questions and address those needs."

With a commitment to full transparency, integrity, and accountability, CuriMeta will work closely with its collaborators to jointly review and approve all data requests from researchers, and will adhere to the most stringent data security, patient privacy, and compliance standards set forth by collaborating health systems, academic health centers, other data contributors, and regulatory authorities. To ensure patient privacy, all health data will be aggregated and de-identified or synthesized so that they provide privacy and confidentiality levels beyond currently required safeguards. In doing so, CuriMeta will advance both state-of-the-art real-world data research and privacy-protecting data sharing technologies.

"Increasingly complex therapies require deeper evidence and the demonstration of higher levels of clinical value and impact in order to receive acceptance and adoption by providers and patients, as well as regulatory approval—and it is becoming increasingly difficult for researchers to access the data necessary to prove such value," said Darren Brodeur, CuriMeta's Chief Commercial Officer and founding team member. "CuriMeta will help address this problem by providing the types of comprehensive, secure, and high-quality health data to researchers in order to ultimately prove the safety, efficacy, and clinical value of new or existing diagnostics and treatments."

Minority investors in CuriMeta include Cultivation Capital Healthcare Innovation Fund.

For more information about this collaboration, please visit: https://medicine.wustl.edu/news/washu-medicine-bjc-healthcare-partner-with-new-company-to-accelerate-lifesaving-research/.

Dedicated to unlocking the full complexities of disease and the impact of health-related interventions, CuriMeta is committed to being a trusted strategic partner focused on propelling promising science forward. Led by a highly experienced team of industry veterans, CuriMeta transforms, curates, and compliantly exchanges privacy-protecting, aggregated real-world health data with researchers to provide the indispensable insights they seek to solve urgent scientific and clinical challenges and improve healthcare for all. For more information, please visit CuriMeta.com.

WashU Medicine is a global leader in academic medicine, including biomedical research, patient care and educational programs with 2,700 faculty. Its National Institutes of Health (NIH) research funding portfolio is the fourth largest among U.S. medical schools, has grown 54% in the last five years, and, together with institutional investment, WashU Medicine commits well over $1 billion annually to basic and clinical research innovation and training. Its faculty practice is consistently within the top five in the country, with more than 1,790 faculty physicians practicing at over 60 locations and who are also the medical staffs of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals of BJC HealthCare. WashU Medicine has a storied history in MD/PhD training, recently dedicated $100 million to scholarships and curriculum renewal for its medical students, and is home to top-notch training programs in every medical subspecialty as well as physical therapy, occupational therapy, and audiology and communications sciences.

BJC HealthCare is one of the largest nonprofit health care organizations in the United States, delivering services to residents primarily in the greater St. Louis, southern Illinois and southeast Missouri regions. Serving the health care needs of urban, suburban and rural communities, BJC includes 14 hospitals and multiple health service organizations. Services provided by BJC include inpatient and outpatient care, primary care, community health and wellness, workplace health, home health, community mental health, rehabilitation, long-term care, and hospice. BJC's nationally recognized academic hospitals, Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals, are affiliated with Washington University School of Medicine.

SOURCE CuriMeta