OWKIN

Uses AI to find better treatments for unmet medical needs, beginning with cancer.

The company takes a “federated learning” approach to data, meaning it partners with organisations to access their data and applies machine-learning algorithms to learn about diseases. The algorithms comb through past clinical data to help predict disease progression upon diagnosis. 

Owkin secured $80 million from pharmaceutical leader Bristol Myers Squibb as the two companies partner on drug trials.

The French-American, New York-based startup, founded in 2016, has developed a federated learning–based technology to speed up drug discovery and development, drawing on health data that is typically siloed, such as from U.S. and European hospitals.

Owkin recently announced two first-ever AI diagnostics approved for use in Europe. The first can predict whether a breast cancer patient will relapse after treatment, while the other can identify a biomarker that opens up potentially life-saving treatment for colorectal cancer patients.