Startups, Artificial Intelligence, Payers

Cigna leads $23M Series D in precision medicine company GNS Healthcare

The insurer joins a host of other investors in the company from the health insurance and biotech industries including Amgen, Celgene, Echo Health Ventures and Alexandria Venture Investments.

Cambridge, Massachusetts-based GNS Healthcare, which uses machine learning to optimize drug development and patient care management programs, has raised a $23 million Series D funding round led by Cigna Ventures.

The insurer joins a host of other investors in the company from the health insurance and biotech industries including Amgen, Celgene, Echo Health Ventures and Alexandria Venture Investments.

GNS utilizes a range of data streams including EHR clinical data, claims data and lab results to better match therapeutics or procedures to individual patients. The company has raised a total of

The company claims its Reverse Engineering & Forward Simulation (REFS) platform goes beyond correlation of related data and is able to identify causal relationships between a treatment and its effect on an individual patient.

Essentially, the company uses its data resources to model patient experiences and help determine the effect of specific health interventions and therapeutics. The company’s clients range from pharma companies like Novartis and Johnson & Johnson to providers like Inova and UC San Francisco.

Cigna officially announced its first dedicated $250 million VC fund last year with the goal to invest in three strategic areas: insights and analytics, digital health and retail, and care delivery and management.

The company’s investments in the data analytics space outside of GNS include predictive analytics startup Prognos, which aims to improve clinical decision-making through early diagnosis of disease.

“Cigna is committed to improving the total health and well-being of our customers – and the personalized clinical care interventions that we expect GNS to facilitate will play a huge role in achieving those improvements,” Cigna’s Global Lead of Strategy and Business Development Tom Richards said in a statement.

“GNS aligns with our vision and together we can super-charge our advanced analytics capabilities and provide even deeper, more predictable insights that will further enhance customer access to the highest quality treatment and care, in the preferred and appropriate place, at the right time.”

Picture: Feodora Chiosea, Getty Images

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