바이오스펙테이터

by Sungmin Kim

Insight Equity Partners, Partners Investment, and the Kite Entrepreneurship Foundation participated in this fund for Korean leading player in the field of AI-based RWD/RWE Plaform

Linewalks, a healthcare big data company, announced on the 9th that it has attracted a total of 5 billion won in series A investment.

Insight Equity Partners, Partners Investment, and Kite Entrepreneur Foundation participated in this investment. In addition, Linewalks has secured a total investment of 7 billion won so far by including angel investment and seed investment of 1.9 billion won from Kakao Investments.

This investment is expected to be used in expanding and building MDwalks, a Real-World Evidence (RWE) platform, and securing professionals in the fields of data, medical, and statistics. It explains that they will focus on data utilization, analysis expertise, and efficiency to secure future competitiveness.

Linewalks is a company that provides data analysis services by combining artificial intelligence technology with health care big data. In particular, they are developing a platform to expand the use of Real World Evidence (RWE), which analyzes Real World Data (RWD) accumulated at the actual treatment site to discover clinical evidence for new efficacy and benefits/side effects of commercially available drugs as well.

Here, the concept is distinct from randomized controlled trials (RCT) that are conducted for drug approval. In the case of clinical studies, small-scale patients are studied in a controlled environment, and there is a limit to fully grasp side effects within the observation period. Accordingly, since 2010, regulatory authorities in the United States and Europe have been moving to approve new drugs and analyze side effects based on RWE.

Currently, Linewalks is conducting research with domestic and foreign pharmaceutical companies and research institutes based on actual use data held by Seoul Asan Medical Center and Health Insurance Review and Assessment Service. The company explains that it is laying the foundation for technology development to provide an advanced artificial intelligence analysis platform in time for Real World Evidence to be applied in the process of developing new drugs in the future.

Linewalks is focusing on two major areas of data analysis. First, artificial intelligence technology analyzes the treatment efficacy by searching the treatment patterns of the characteristic patient group in Electronic Medical Records. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) accepted RWE from the electronic medical record data as a main evidence; an example of applying it to the development of new drugs is Amgen's "Blincyto" which was approved through the FDA's expedited review in 2014.

Linewalks plans to significantly expand the RWE project to support major pharmaceutical partners, and is focusing on research in the oncology, particularly lung cancer, breast cancer, and pancreatic cancer.

The second area they are focusing on is the field of artificial intelligence (AI) medical devices. Linewalks has been developing artificial intelligence prediction technology that utilizes data from patients with cardiovascular diseases by participating in the 'Dr. Answer' project, an artificial intelligence-based precision medical solution, under the supervision of the Ministry of Science and ICT for the past three years. Based on this technology, artificial intelligence medical devices will be developed to detect the possibility of severe acute diseases in high-risk cardiovascular patients. The medical device, which can help with diagnosis and prognosis management at the actual medical site, aims to complete clinical trials and licensing procedures by 2022.

YongHyun Cho, CEO of Linewalks, said, "Through this investment, we can lay the foundation for spreading Linewalks' data analysis capabilities to the medical community and support RWE-specific retrospective clinical data analysis more efficiently. Based on Lineworks' Real World Evidence platform, MDWalks, we plan to provide high-quality analysis services to hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and medical device companies."

Soyong Sung, director of Insight Equity Partners, who led the investment, said that he made the investment by saying, "We believe that it is a leading company that can analyze RWD with AI-based technology in the RWE field where rapid growth is expected."

Sumin Sim, Managing Director of Partners Investments, said, “The use of RWD and RWE for post-marketing of pharmaceuticals and medical devices, approval revisions, expansion of indications, and establishment of new product development strategies is a field with great potential that has just started to grow.” Linewalks, as a domestic leader in the RWD/RWE platform field, is currently focusing on analyzing complex and unmet medical needs such as cancer using medical data in large hospitals.”