The National Science Foundation, today announced a grant to VMT for developing technology focused on pragmatic clinical trials allowing clinical outcomes to be extracted from real-world data. VMT is a medical technology incubation firm, developing and commercializing cutting-edge healthcare products to address critical healthcare needs.
The approach uses artificial intelligence to dive deep into the electronic health record (EHR) for outcome data to enable EHR-based pragmatic clinical trials. Upon completion of the grant, VMT intends to spin out its technology to Verantos, the market leader in regulatory-grade EHR-based studies.
Utilizing RWE to Augment Standard of Care
As regulatory bodies increasingly look to real-world evidence (RWE) to augment the standard of care, pharmaceutical companies are exploring how to run advanced studies to understand the real-world impact of therapies on important clinical outcomes. Outcomes, such as symptoms, signs, and disease-free survival, are unavailable or inaccurate in claims and EHR structured data. This award will deploy advanced semantic technologies to extract these hidden outcomes and enable valid and relevant RWE.
Grant Funding Details
Support for this grant is provided by the National Science Foundation’s Small Business Innovation Research program under award number 1819388. The Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) / Small Business Technology Transfer (STTR) programs are intended to provide the early stage, high-tech small businesses with grants for proof-of-concept/feasibility research that could potentially be followed by grants for cutting-edge, high-quality scientific research and development to de-risk their technologies.
“The National Science Foundation supports small businesses with the most innovative, cutting-edge ideas that have the potential to become great commercial successes and make huge societal impacts,” said Barry Johnson, Director of the NSF’s Division of Industrial Innovation and Partnerships. “We hope that this seed funding will spark solutions to some of the most important challenges of our time across all areas of science and technology.”