Interview with Louis Létinier from Synapse Medicine

“In France, 30 000 deaths are caused by drug misuses every year.”

By Margaux Barbier and Daiki Yoshioka

🎙 La French Tech Tokyo held our first clubouse event and welcomed Louis Létinier, founder of Synapse Medicine, which is a French startup that uses technology to fight drug misprescription.

Louis shares his journey as a founder and the company’s ambitions in the world, more specifically in Japan.

Welcome, Louis! Could you introduce yourself to our audience?

Hello everyone! My name is Louis Létinier, a French physician specializing in pharmacology and data science. I am also the co-founder and medical director of Synapse Medicine.

Synapse Medicine is a MedTech pioneer in Europe. We specialized in pharmacovigilance: a science related to the detection, assessment, understanding, and prevention of adverse effects.

At Synapse, we try to develop tools that facilitate the proper use of drugs around the world. Our main platform, “Medication Intelligence”, uses artificial intelligence and data sciences to gather and analyze a large set of medical data for health professionals.

🚀 In a few words, our mission is to give everyone access to the best and the most appropriate medicine.

Could you tell us more about the creation of Synapse?

It’s really important to keep in mind that the idea behind Synapse came from two doctors: Clément Goehrs and myself. During our time working at the Bordeaux University Hospital, we witnessed the very poor performance of digital tools dedicated to medical uses. The medical field has years and years of delay when it comes to technology.

Here are a few numbers to illustrate the needs that our solution is trying to meet:

🇫🇷 Every year in France, around 30 000 deaths are caused by drug misuses.

🇺🇸 In the United States, drug misuse causes about a million patients to visit emergency rooms, and 350 000 hospitalizations every year.

🇯🇵 In Japan, 30% of the country’s total hospitalizations are linked to drug misuses.

This is a global public health challenge, and awareness of such issues needs to increase. This is the reason why Clément and myself decided to create Synapse.

Tell us more about Synapse’s solution to respond to such a challenge.

Synapse offers tools and technologies to medical professionals. Our solution allows them to access the necessary information to prescribe and manage appropriate medication. We are also developing products for the general public so that everyone can be informed and aware of the proper uses of each medicine.

The “Medication Intelligence” platform

Our main platform was developed internally, by a team of experts in data sciences and medical information management. One of our key Research & Development priorities is to develop natural language processing (NLP) systems.

NLP is a branch of computer sciences. It aims to program systems that can understand the contents of documents but also their contextual nuances. This technology can then extract extremely accurate information and organize it.

Our algorithms extract information from official reports such as Summaries of Product Characteristics (SPC), which are documents describing the properties and the officially approved conditions of use of a medicine. Our systems allow us to crossreference a lot of different sources in different languages. This way, our users can access all the information they need from the same tool.

We offer various ways to use our platform. Healthcare professionals and patients can access it through a mobile app available for Android and Apple. We also offer integrations with existing Electronic Health Systems (EHS) using API and widget systems.

Who, and where, are your users?

We are mainly working with hospitals. We also help general practitioners with tools related to telemedicine. For the moment, our activity is mainly focused on France but the ambition of Synapse is to expand internationally.

We already have partners and customers in Italy, Spain, Germany and United Kingdom. In the following months, we would like to accelerate our expansion in the two most important markets for us: the U.S. and Japan.

How do you plan to approach the American and the Japanese market?

Synapse and the United States

When we enter a new market, our first action is to initiate partnerships with universities and hospitals. This way, we can have our solutions tested by local professionals, receive feedback, and adapt our product to the local needs.

The public health challenges that the U.S. are facing make it an important market for us. As our co-founder, Clément Goehrs, studied at Stanford University, it allowed us to form a strong partnership and to work directly with their research team.

Synapse and Japan

Since the creation of Synapse, the Japanese market has been one of our top-priorities. Japan is a significant stakeholder in the development and the regulation of medicine.

Also, as Japan is becoming an aging society, an increasing amount of drugs is being prescribed. This means, the risk of medicine misuse grows bigger. As the diversity and the quantity of medicine increase, the information is susceptible to be more cluttered. Numerous scientific publications regularly point out the real need of Japan for tools that allows an effective and transparent monitoring of drugs.

Despite the pandemic, we were able to establish several collaboration programs in Japan. Synapse is enrolled in a research program with the artificial intelligence team of Tokyo University. And, as Japan starts to reopen its borders, we are hoping to focus even more on the Japanese market.

Which challenges do you expect to face in Japan?

The Japanese market is a real challenge for Synapse. We will have to understand the needs of health professionals, the desires of patients, their concerns, the country’s regulation, and, of course, the “Japanese mentality” beneath it. The development of natural language processing tools for Japan will require hiring and collaborating with local experts. We are confident that we will be able to leverage our successful experiences in Europe and we look forward to this new exciting adventure!

Entering Japan is part of our strategy as a corporation. It is also a way for us to open Asia and to start building a network in other countries such as South Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore. To conclude, we are eager to focus on the Japanese market and, after a few years, then branch out in Asia so that more people can have a better access to medicine.