10th March 2016
Digital Health Labs wins over the Dragons
Digital Health Labs is celebrating taking the top spot in a Dragons’ Den-style investment competition.
The Cardiff-based healthcare data science consultancy pitched its Metalyst platform to a team of six high-profile investors, including Sir Chris Evans OBE, at this year’s BioWales Conference. There was high praise from the international audience and judging panel for Metalyst’s originality and potential, and the business walked away with prizes that included £2,000.
Metalyst will accelerate research on new therapies for challenging modern conditions such as cancer, diabetes, cardio-vascular disease and dementia. Through innovative collaboration features and integrated analysis tools, the online platform brings about faster meta analysis of clinical trial results, creating valuable information on the relative effectiveness of therapies in development. Metalyst will reduce research costs considerably, so life sciences companies will be able to use their budgets more effectively and make better progress on addressing common and less common conditions. Ultimately, this is expected to lead to global companies making sound research decisions more quickly. There will be a more efficient product pipeline, and effective treatments will be available to patients in less time than it currently takes.
The Dragons’ Den panel included Professor Trevor Jones CBE, Director of Arthurian Life Sciences and former Director General of The Association of The British Pharmaceutical Industry ABPI. He said, “Meta analysis of clinical and related data is of fundamental importance to establish the cost effectiveness of therapeutic interventions and forms the basis of reviews by health care providers including, in the UK, The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence N.I.C.E. Such analyses can also inform the pathway of clinical research during the development of new therapies. The systems in current use by companies throughout the pharmaceutical and biotech industry worldwide rely on extensive, laborious, search procedures. Metalyst provides a more efficient and importantly timely means of conducting these analyses, which can result in considerable cost saving to the industry and faster times to market. Digital Health Labs has the potential to become the leading international resource in this field.”
The company is pressing ahead with further development of the platform and exploring collaboration and investment opportunities.
Dr Poole, Chief Research Officer at Digital Health Labs, said “We are incredibly excited about the potential of this platform to transform this type of research and we’re proud that the Dragons agree with us. This prize will allow us to connect directly with investors and decision-makers in the Welsh life sciences industry to work with us to bring our concept to life.”