London, UK, 31 March 2023
Concr, a techbio company with a statistical learning-powered biomarker prediction engine, announced today the close of a £1.22 million seed round. The funding will be used to enhance Concr’s scientific and product development and grow its portfolio of pharmaceutical partnerships.
Concr welcomed new investors SyndicateRoom and Jo Pisani from Cambridge Angels in a round co-led by Cambridge Enterprise, the commercialisation arm of the University of Cambridge, which invested alongside the existing investor R42 Group. This seed round follows a prior £500,000 funding in 2021, which saw Concr grow its core team and enter the market.
Dr Loukik Arora, Investment Associate, Cambridge Enterprise, said: “We are excited to lead this investment in Concr and to support their platform’s novel approach to analyse sparse and chaotic oncology data. We believe it will deliver lifesaving insights in the form of biomarkers, bringing precision medicine to all. We look forward to being part of Concr’s growth and impact journey.”
Dr Ronjon Nag, President of R42 Group, commented on the repeat investment: “It is great to invest in a stellar team applying novel AI/ML techniques to predict life-saving drug candidates with a significantly greater data-efficacy compared to the existing methods in cancer drug discovery and development.”
Tom Britton, Founding Partner of SyndicateRoom, incoming in this round, said: “We are delighted to be a part of Concr's journey, their platform provides a novel approach to joining up and analysing data that should rapidly speed up the process of identifying suitable biomarkers for drugs development and the treatment of cancer. We look forward to following their progress and the impact it may have on lives around the globe.”
Founded by biomedical engineer Matt Foster, computational physicist Dr Matthew Griffiths, and medical oncologist Dr Uzma Asghar, Concr uses established computational frameworks from astrophysics to interlink disparate and messy oncology data to allow scientists to confidently identify and develop biomarkers of drug response, with minimal data requirements. These biomarker predictions de-risk pivotal clinical trials and improve patient outcomes through effective stratification.
Matt Foster, Chief Executive Officer of Concr, commented on the raise: “Our vision is to ensure precision oncology reaches the widest population, and that the widest population reaches precision oncology. This requires us to efficiently integrate diverse data modalities (solve data), to identify predictive biomarkers of treatment response (enabling precision diagnostics), that are generalisable to the widest patient cohorts (for all).
We have demonstrated significant headway with our technology used across novel diagnostic modalities in preclinical study design to biomarker optimisation for late phase clinical trial design, and application in wide scale clinical cohort research.
We are honoured to receive support to achieve this, from diverse sources of leading SME funding. With top university, grant and private sector funding across the UK, USA and Australia, we draw upon a truly global body of support.
With this opportunity ahead of us, we welcome innovative teams from academia, biopharma and healthcare sectors to join our growing user base”.
About Concr
Concr is a mission-driven techbio company that answers essential questions in oncology through solving data. By adopting astrophysics methods used to study the universe, Concr unlocked the ability to effectively integrate diverse and incomplete datasets to help scientists identify and develop biomarkers for their drugs with 300x less pre-clinical and 7x less clinical data. Using Concr’s online platform, FarrSight™, researchers can make advanced predictions about biomarkers and model patient response by leveraging Concr’s unique technology, as well as perform standard bioinformatics analyses directly.
The company is headquartered in London, UK, with a wholly-owned subsidiary in Brisbane, Australia. The company is a venture capital-backed enterprise, with investors including the University of Cambridge Enterprise, Cambridge Angels, R42, and Deep Science Ventures.
For more information please contact:
Concr
Matt Foster, Chief Executive Officer
info@concr.co
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