AI blood test firm strikes partnership with Microsoft

Prevencio, which uses artificial intelligence to create blood tests that diagnose cardiovascular disease, has struck a Microsoft Agreement which includes Microsoft’s Azure AI-computing Cloud and Microsoft’s marketing expertise.

It means that leading to Microsoft Healthcare’s salesforce will sell Prevencio’s AI-driven HART cardiac blood tests intoits existing customer base, including hospitals and life science accounts. Additional terms of the deal are not disclosed.

Microsoft has invested more than $500 million to assist start-ups in scaling commercialisation. In addition to Azure AI, marketing expertise and its salesforce, Microsoft provides digital and social campaigns to promote product launch, a customised Go-to-Market plan, and targeted industry marketing and account planning.

Prevencio’s principal investigator, James L. Januzzi, a practicing cardiologist at Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) and professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School, said: “Heart disease is the number one cause of death in the US—killing more people than all cancers combined. With more than 15 million US heart disease patients, and tens of millions of additional patients at risk, there is a clear unmet need for highly accurate, AI-based, multi-protein blood tests. Machine learning and AI, in conjunction with multiple proteins or genes, have been successful in improving diagnosis and care of cancer patients. It is rewarding to see these important technological advancements being applied to cardiac care.”

Rhonda Rhyne, Prevencio’s chief executive officer, added: “We are excited to collaborate with Microsoft to launch our HART tests on the Azure AI-computing, secure cloud and to sell into large healthcare systems and Contract Research Organisations (CROs). Microsoft’s efforts will complement our corporate focus on offering our HART tests to concierge physicians. Based on robust physician and patient feedback, we plan to launch in July 2020 our HART CVE test for a patient’s one-year risk of heart attack, stroke or cardiac death and HART CAD for diagnosis of heart disease.

“We are grateful for our ongoing collaboration with Dr. Januzzi, MGH researchers, our lab partner Myriad RBM, and now with Microsoft. We have extensive data on our HART tests and are very pleased to transition from research use to offer our tests for patient care.”