A company that aims to partner with drugmakers developing treatments for rare diseases by allowing access to data from electronic health records has raised a round of seed funding.
San Francisco-based RDMD said Monday that it had raised $3 million in seed financing, led by Lux Capital and with participation from Village Global, First Round’s Healthcare Co-Op, Shasta Ventures and undisclosed angel investors.
The company’s business model involves EHR data from patients, rare disease doctors and foundations in a regulatory-compliant database, it said, with the goal of transforming unstructured data from medical records into disease-specific data models that can be analyzed. The plan is to use the funding to hire employers to keep up with demand and build out its platform, said co-founder and CEO Nancy Yu in a phone interview.
Most medical records data are unusable because they were in physician notes and progress reports that are not easily mined, the company said. RDMD will work with research doctors specialized in various rare diseases to define relevant data measures and biomarkers to collect and use for clinical development, with its technology enabling audit trails and links to original source documents to ensure compliance and quality control.
Health records were not even digitized until about 10 years ago, Yu said. Furthermore, they were not built for research, which is why it is hard to access physicians’ notes. As such, she said, the company takes advantage of its work with patients and physician-researchers, while leveraging its platform into a format that can be readily used by the biotechnology and pharmaceutical industries. The company will initially focus on neurology and inherited metabolic disorders, though its platform is designed to encompass all rare diseases, the thinking being that the diseases are unique, but the dynamics across them are very similar. The company’s founder is Onno Faber, a former tech industry CEO who developed neurofibromatosis type 2, a disease that causes noncancerous tumors in the nervous system.
Amid public concern about the implications of Big Data and data mining, co-founder and CEO Nancy Yu said privacy will be a top priority for the company, as privacy and security remain concerns despite the excitement from patients that the company has generated. As such, she said, RDMD ensures that data are de-identified, with very little risk that the drug companies will be able to identify or even contact patients, who give informed consent and sign a form allowing their de-identified data to be used for research.
A Deep-dive Into Specialty Pharma
A specialty drug is a class of prescription medications used to treat complex, chronic or rare medical conditions. Although this classification was originally intended to define the treatment of rare, also termed “orphan” diseases, affecting fewer than 200,000 people in the US, more recently, specialty drugs have emerged as the cornerstone of treatment for chronic and complex diseases such as cancer, autoimmune conditions, diabetes, hepatitis C, and HIV/AIDS.
Drugmakers focused on rare diseases need access to high-quality data and also to patients, Yu said, and they are interested in RDMD providing data for retrospective natural history studies and supporting clinical trial design decisions. In that sense, she said, one could see the company performing some of the functions of contract research organizations.
Photo: Pakhnyushchyy, Getty Images
