A company developing a system to allow multiple sclerosis patients and neurologists to manage care has raised $14 million in a Series A funding round.
Menlo Park, California-based Octave Bioscience said last week that Blue Cross Blue Shield Venture Partners led the funding round, with participation from Echo Health Ventures, Section 32 and others. Michael Pellini, Section 32’s managing partner and chairman of diagnostics firm Foundation Medicine, participated in a fireside chat at last week’s MedCity CONVERGE conference in Philadelphia with MedCity News Editor-in-Chief Arundhati Parmar. Roche, which acquired a majority stake in Foundation Medicine for $780 million in January 2015 and invested another $250 million, acquired the remainder of the company for $2.4 billion last month.
The Series A round follows a previous $2.5 million round of seed funding. The company plans to use the Series A funding to complete development of its MS-treatment platform, which incorporates biomarkers, patient tracking tools and magnetic resonance imaging optimization to provide neurologists and patients metrics for informed care and shared decision making to improve patient outcomes.
A May 2016 report by Markets and Markets found that the global market for care management solutions would grow from $6.93 billion in 2016 to $15.7 billion in 2021 due to factors such as efforts to shift the burden of risk from healthcare payers to providers, patient-centric mandates, the aging of the population, growth in chronic disease, the need to reduce healthcare costs, medical tourism and improvements in information technology and data analysis.
The report divided the market into web-based, cloud-based and on-premise systems, with the web-based segment expected to have the largest share of the market and cloud-based systems expected to see the highest growth rate. Chronic care management, case management, disease management and utilization management were the main segments based on application. Companies that are major players in the market include Allscripts Healthcare Solutions, TriZetto Corp., Phytel, EXL Healthcare, AxisPoint Health and others, all of them US-based.
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