Qureight secures £500k Seed investment from CMS Ventures

The imaging analytics company Qureight have secured £500K in seed funding from CMS Ventures, a move which will enable the startup to launch the second iteration of their ground-breaking platform.

The rapidly growing market for clinical imaging analytics is set to be worth $4.3 billion (£3.4 billion) by 2025. Qureight is one of the more specialist companies in the industry with strong clinical expertise from its founders and sees this funding as a route to scale. It also aims to develop a newly improved and streamlined version of its analytical platform; harnessing the ability of AI and advanced processing tools to gain new insights into respiratory diseases, such as Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF) and lung cancer.

IPF is a condition which results in an irreversible scarring of the lungs, causing breathing to become increasingly difficult over time. Although several novel drugs exist to slow disease progression, the cause of IPF remains unclear, and no cure is yet available to patients. Lung cancer is the most commonly occurring cancer in men and the third most commonly occurring cancer in women worldwide.

The Cambridge, UK-based start-up was founded in 2018 with a vision to transform routine real-world clinical data into structured information suitable for scientific research and the development of AI tools. In essence, Qureight works closely with innovative and established companies in the healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors to transform raw patient data into effective models which in turn can be used to better diagnose and realise treatments for respiratory diseases.

“This investment will allow us to grow our team and capitalise on recent partnerships in industry to analyse upcoming clinical trial data in a number of respiratory diseases. Crucially, it will allow us to launch the next iteration of our platform to deeper integrate with large data sets. We are really excited that CMS Ventures has decided to join us on the journey as we scale the company. By unlocking the data from an individual patient journey, we will be able to help many others with the same diseases.”

– QUREIGHT CO-FOUNDER AND CEO, DR. MUHUNTHAN THILLAI

“The CMS investment in Qureight is a success on multiple fronts: it is a win for the Cambridge ecosystem, for the brilliant team at Qureight, and it marks the first fruit of the collaboration launched earlier this year between CMS, AstraZeneca, and CJBS.

This partnership aims to bridge a gap in the funding in the UK for biotech and life sciences early stage ventures; building on the strategic partnership that AstraZeneca and CJBS have developed since 2015 and that has seen over 80 AZ employees engage, mentor, and grow local biotech and life sciences startups.

This investment illustrates how valuable the hard work put in jointly by CJBS and AstraZeneca is in supporting new and ambitious founders from a scientific background, such as Dr Thillai and Dr Ruggiero, by helping them navigate and structure organisational, commercial, and financial issues; and by acting as a catalyst to turn their ideas into reality.”

– DEAN OF THE CAMBRIDGE JUDGE BUSINESS SCHOOL, PROF. CHRISTOPH LOCH

ABOUT QUREIGHT

Founded by clinicians and data scientists in Cambridge, the Qureight team believes that unlocking data from a single patient’s journey can help the lives of many. CEO Dr Muhunthan Thillai is the Director for the Cambridge Interstitial Lung Disease Unit. He has a background in laboratory research with a PhD from Imperial College London in the immunology of lung diseases. Dr. Thillai is accompanied by Co- founder and COO Dr Alessandro Ruggiero who is a cardio-thoracicradiologist with a PhD in molecular imaging. Dr. Ruggiero was one of the first researchers in the world to publish work on the use of Cerenkov luminescence imaging. Read more about their team here.

Safiya Marzook

Related post

This will close in 25 seconds