About AiCure Predictive Insights. Personalized Care.
Vision Statement
To improve personalized care for patients globally by empowering remote digital and targeted therapies.
Mission Statement
At AiCure, we put personalized care into the hands of scientists, healthcare professionals and patients through advanced computer vision and machine learning software, empowering unbiased and objective digital diagnoses and predictive insights to optimize care.
Who We Serve
AiCure is the patient-centric eClinical trials management platform company that empowers life science and healthcare organizations to unlock valuable unbiased, computer-vision driven insights to optimize personalized care.
Awards
AiCure’s Story
AiCure Founders Adam Hanina and Gordon Kessler met each other while working on their MBAs at Wharton in the mid 2000s. Hanina first described his vision of using computer vision algorithms in healthcare while the two shared lunch in Manhattan one summer afternoon. Hanina and Kessler eventually crossed paths with Laura Schafner, a former financial analyst who shared Hanina's vision of predictive algorithms in healthcare.
Schafner grew up with a psychiatrist father who himself suffered from bipolar disorder, which affected his adherence to treatments. She discovered that healthcare at the time lacked a "360 view of the patient," with a focus only on diseases. Schafner believed human behavior could be accurately predicted in public health using similar methodologies to the finance sector. And so, the earliest concept of AiCure was born: taking a nurse-patient interaction and technologically scaling it to create novel insights based on years of experience assessing and mitigating risk.
By 2009, Kessler filed the partnership paperwork for AiCure Technologies, LLC and the journey to optimize drug development and patient care through AI would begin. Later that year, Kessler and Hanina filed the company's first three patent applications, and not long after, Lei Guan joined the team as the fourth founder in addition to being the first and only engineer.
AiCure secured a momentous $273,000 grant from the NIH through its Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program. The company quickly became an innovator in patient engagement and delivering the predictive and objective insights needed to make patient data actionable and optimize care. Despite AI bias being mostly overlooked for the last decade, AiCure was already pioneering inclusive, unbiased solutions such as its facial recognition algorithms which have been trained to use diverse datasets representative of real-world populations.
For AiCure, emphasizing the role of diverse datasets in building AI goes far beyond just having good technology or diversity for diversity’s sake. AiCure proactively builds diversity into its algorithms, promoting accountability and a common language in which the community can discuss these sensitive issues.
Cautiously optimistic of AiCure’s mission, Abbott Laboratories requested to have the AiCure system in a trial by June of 2012. Hanina and Kessler immediately built a team to actually deploy the system in a pilot study with Dr. David P. Walling. The study evaluated the use of a novel AI platform on mobile devices for measuring medication adherence versus directly observed therapy.
The pilot results resoundingly demonstrated the impact of AI platforms to increase adherence, rapidly detect nonadherence and even predict future nonadherence. Additionally, the study showed that providing patients the support they need allows sponsors to enrich the relationship between patients and sites, which ultimately advances an understanding of disease for the improved health of all patients. Walling, once a true skeptic of the technology, became one of AiCure’s first raving fans in the medical space.
The results were well received by the healthcare community overall, leading to AiCure’s first commercial contract with AbbVie, a biopharmaceutical company. Just a year later, AiCure's first patent was issued. Following this success, AiCure's AI platform would draw over $12 million in Series A funding, in addition to winning the 2016 Alconics Award for Best Start-up Success Story. The company also won the Scrip Award for Best Technological Development in Clinical Trials that year. AiCure went on to raise an additional $15 million in Series B funding in 2017 just a year after a successful Phase 2 Takeda study that boasted a 96.7% adherence in post-hospital discharge patients. Two years later, a Series C round brought in $24.5 million right as AiCure announced a partnership with Syneos, a multinational contract research organization.
During these formative years, AiCure’s repository of de-identified patient audio and visual data for benchmarking and comparative development rapidly grew. This novel data helps refine analytic approaches to patient insights and addresses questions of generalizability, diversity, and overall potential market impact.
While the use of AI is soaring, the impact of innovative technologies is limited without building the foundations needed to foster equality. AiCure appointed its former Chief Medical Officer Ed Ikeguchi, M.D., as its chief executive officer in 2020 to lead the company on its ongoing mission of promoting transparency into algorithms development, leading to more accurate, fairer outcomes, and ensuring advanced technologies reach their potential to work for patients globally.
AiCure was rebuilding algorithms to better accommodate more diverse patient sets as early as 2011. By recruiting diverse volunteers and incorporating fashion accessories like glasses, hats and artificial nails, AiCure has reached over 1 million dosing interactions across patient populations more representative of real-world populations, as opposed to the existing approaches that were largely built using fair-skinned people.
Guided by Ikeguchi's mission of promoting diversity, equity and inclusion, AiCure applies this standard across all channels from its hiring processes and employee commitments to its vendors and suppliers. The company brings in talent and perspectives from all over the globe with flexible location hiring and diverse, pre-interview recruitment pools. AiCure also regularly reviews the commitments to diversity, equity and inclusion of its partnering suppliers. When it comes to vendors, AiCure is a proud supporter of small- and minority-owned businesses.
Integral to the mission of making healthcare a more inclusive industry overall, Ikeguchi gestured to holistic health delivery in an AiCure blog about mitigating bias in AI saying, “Together, we can hold each other to a higher standard so we can do right by our patients and realize the true promise of these technologies.”