Announcing Iterative Scopes
Breyer Capital believes that data science has the power to find solutions to some of the biggest challenges in healthcare today. In particular, we are interested in supporting companies that successfully apply artificial intelligence, machine learning, and virtual reality tools, especially in disease areas that may not be getting as much attention as they should.
To this end, Breyer Capital is pleased to announce its investment in Iterative Scopes, a digital health company that is at the forefront of bringing cutting-edge computational tools to the practice of gastroenterology.
Advanced precision medicine and big data initiatives are lagging in the treatment of gastroenterology, leading to inefficient, expensive clinical trials and inconsistent diagnoses of common GI diseases, such as inflammatory bowel disease and colorectal cancer.
Successfully advancing AI-driven software in this field will have a big impact not only on individual care but on the population at large. GI diseases are among the most common chronic conditions and are inefficiently and often ineffectively treated. With the right entrepreneurs, technologies, and investors, AI and machine learning can play a major role in changing that unfortunate paradigm.
We are impressed by Iterative Scopes’ rapid progress. Spun out of MIT, the company was founded by CEO Jonathan Ng, MD, who has spent his career bringing scale to digital innovation in healthcare. As one indicator of the magnitude of the impact of these diseases, there are compelling sales numbers: the GI opportunity tops $125 billion in the US and of that, IBD alone is a $50 billion market. To put this in perspective, oncology, where so much of the life sciences world is focused right now from an investment and innovative perspective, is a $200 billion market in the US.
The company’s proprietary AI-driven software and computer vision technologies digitize and standardize what is now a highly subjective field. The initial applications, some of which are already commercially available, are for real-time endoscopic feature detection for colorectal cancer as a step toward improving the accuracy and consistency of patient care. Down the road, the company is creating new predictive models that can augment clinical trial endpoints and individualized treatment selection processes with the potential to create better predictors of therapeutic response and disease outcomes.
High-quality, reliable datasets are at the core of differentiating all AI-driven companies. Through an expanding network of partnerships, including a number of which are exclusive and unique, Iterative Scopes is leading the way in building a training data repository for GI diseases.
For the company’s biopharma customers, Iterative Scopes brings solutions to the bottlenecks that slow down the patient recruitment process in clinical trials and lead to the waste of resources throughout the drug development cycle. Ultimately, biopharma companies that use Iterative Scopes’ precision software will have competitive advantages in an increasingly crowded disease space.
These are exactly the kind of big disease challenges and solutions that Breyer Capital gravitates toward in its investment portfolio. We were founding investors in Paige.AI, a company that has led the way in supporting digital innovation in pathology, a field of medicine that was stagnant for decades. Now, we are thrilled to be at the forefront of a movement that is bringing precision medicine to gastroenterology. It is my hope that we can continue to identify opportunities to invest in companies addressing a big unmet need where the application of artificial intelligence and machine learning may change the entire landscape for treating a disease area.
