NanoView Biosciences has closed on a $10 million Series B financing

Artificial intelligence-powered precision medicine company GNS Healthcare has announced a $23 million Series D fundraising round led by Cigna Ventures, a  wholly owned indirect subsidiary of Cigna Corp. Joining the financing round were Amgen Ventures, Celgene, Echo Health Ventures, Alexandria Venture Investments, as well as former Caesar’s CEO and Aetna division President Gary Loveman.

“Cigna is committed to improving the total health and well-being of our customers—and the personalized clinical care interventions that we expect GNS to facilitate will play a huge role in achieving those improvements,” said Tom Richards, global lead, strategy & business development at Cigna in a prepared statement. “GNS aligns with our vision and together we can super-charge our advanced analytics capabilities and provide even deeper, more predictable insights that will further enhance customer access to the highest quality treatment and care, in the preferred and appropriate place, at the right time.”

GNS leverages its core machine learning technology REFS (reverse engineering & forward simulation) to develop “causal models” of health and disease. These model are created using clinical, genetic, lab, image, drug, genomic, proteomic, consumer, pharmacy as well as other available data, comprising trillions of data point, according to the company. The resulting causal models are then subjected to myriad “what if” scenarios to gain a more complete understanding of the underlying biological relationships.

“Biology is complex and unless you understand the ‘why’ or root cause, it’s difficult to intervene or treat patients successfully,” the company website notes.

Using this technology and method, GNS converts these data into in silico patients that allows REFS to precisely match therapeutics, procedures, and care management interventions to individuals to drive personalized clinical care and medicine and improve health outcomes.

GNS currently focuses providing services in three arenas: health plans, biopharma companies, and foundations. Through it’s first four rounds of private financing, it has garnered equity investment the biopharma sector from company such as Amgen Ventures, Celgene, and Zambon Pharmaceuticals; and additional investments from health plans such as Cambia Health Solutions, Echo Health Ventures, Horizon Blue Cross of NJ, and Heritage Provider Network.

“We are thrilled to have Cigna contribute to our next phase of growth,” said Colin Hill, chairman, CEO and co-founder of GNS Healthcare, in a press release. “As one of the largest and most forward-thinking global health services companies, Cigna is the perfect complement to our cadre of leading biopharma companies and health plan partners committed to improving patient outcomes through causal AI and the precision healthcare it enables.”

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