ConcertAI, Bayer join forces to advance precision oncology

Healthcare data company ConcertAI announced a multi-year agreement with pharmaceutical and biotechnology giant Bayer to utilize ConcertAI’s Translational360 and AI SaaS offerings.

The offerings use AI and machine learning-acquired insights to speed up clinical development in precision oncology.

The agreement aims to utilize ConcertAI’s Translational360 offering, an integrated research-level longitudinal clinical molecular database that harnesses the CancerLinQ network of anonymized cancer patient data from more than nine million records from all 50 states.

Translational360 incorporates “clinical, genomic, transcriptomic and whole-slide imaging from comprehensive molecular testing for deep phenotypical and genomic insights.”

Transcriptomics allows researchers to understand disease molecular mechanisms, the basis of patient response and inter-patient flexibility, which is crucial for developing new therapeutics.

Combining integrated data solutions and AI will allow for selecting programs with the highest probability of success and design trials influenced by multimodal, multi-genomic and transcriptomic data and AI.

“This partnership builds on a multi-year history of working together and is unique in offering both tissue and liquid biopsy molecular data, allowing insights into patterns of treatment response, acquisition of resistance, AI modeling of likely success and benefit, informing program priority and clinical study design,” Jeff Elton, CEO of ConcertAI, said in a statement. 

THE LARGER TREND

Last year, ConcertAI named Dhiraj Carumbay as senior vice president and general manager of the company’s TeraRecon business. 

Carumbay managed business units at RadNet, Amazon AWS, Philips Healthcare, Fujifilm and GE HealthCare. At AWS, he oversaw Amazon’s cloud solutions for the healthcare and life-sciences industries. Before that, he held business leadership and global product roles at GE HealthCare. 

In 2023, ConcertAI expanded its partnership with Caris Life Sciences. The companies jointly created a database to generate insights to advance precision medicine, clinical trial management and therapeutic development. 

The partners developed a database that leveraged both companies’ clinical, molecular and multimodal data to permit academics and biopharma researchers to gain insights for oncology-focused precision medicine, clinical trial management and therapeutic development.

In 2022, ConcertAI scored $150 million in Series C funding. The round bumped the then-five-year-old company’s valuation to $1.9 billion. As part of the deal, Sixth Street’s managing director, Adam Kaye, joined ConcertAI’s board, and managing director Lee Mooney was named a board observer. 

In 2024, GenAI radiology workflow company Rad AI and Bayer collaborated to bring Rad AI’s technology to the multinational pharmaceutical and biotechnology company’s Calantic Digital Solution customers. 

Calantic is a vendor-neutral cloud-based marketplace of AI-enabled radiology apps aimed at automating routine radiology tasks. Rad AI offers radiologists generative AI tools to help streamline workflows, including physician dictation and follow-up care management offerings. 

That same year, Google Cloud and Bayer partnered to develop AI applications aimed at reducing radiologist burnout and increasing efficiencies in diagnoses. 

Bayer expanded its innovation platform using Google Cloud technology, including its generative AI tools. Other tools available on the platform include Google Cloud’s Vertex AI, BigQuery, Healthcare API and Chronicle. The offering was intended to help organizations build scalable and compliant AI-enabled software for medical imaging while ensuring data security.