Longenesis has raised $1.2 million in a late seed round led by Rustam Gilfanov and supported by a group of business angels. Ilya Suharenko, a private investor and one of the Managing Partners of LongeVC, participated in the round as well, bringing 17 years of his experience in traditional banking to the event.
Longenesis is developing tools to expedite the digitization of biomedical research, which will be available within a short time. Its primary goal is to increase patients’ engagement and trust in research organizations and study sponsors, as well as to enable clinical sites and patient advocacy groups to compliantly expose their patients’ data for biomedical research in a safe and secure environment.
Medical data is sensible and confidential, and as a result, researchers who require large and detailed data sets have faced considerable challenges. Longenesis will help reduce recruitment costs and accelerate biomedical research by introducing digitalization and consent-enabled showcasing of biomedical assets, as well as by emphasizing patient-centricity.
The funds raised will allow Longenesis to expand its presence in key markets while also increasing the scale of its core products’ deployment. A total of three products are the basis of Longenesis’ services:
Longenesis Curator
Curator enables research organizations, such as hospitals or biobanks, to publish anonymized patient data sets and receive collaboration requests from other parties interested in using the data.
Patient confidentiality is ensured because the data does not contain any personally identifiable information. However, the data-enhanced presentation and accessibility allow third parties to quickly determine whether or not the data is relevant to their research projects, speeding up what has previously been a difficult, slow, expensive, and time-consuming process lasting weeks or months. This opens up the research potential of personalized data while maintaining the privacy of the data subjects and adhering to local regulatory requirements.
Researchers from universities, government agencies, and artificial intelligence companies can use the data for advanced analyses as well.
Longenesis Themis
Longenesis Themis is an API-based consent management system used to onboard patients in medical studies and clinical trials. It enables the highest level of patient-centricity and empowers patients to play a more proactive role in research studies and also better understand their own contribution to the studies, according to the researchers.
Lilian Tzivian, Ph.D., an internationally renowned epidemiologist at the University of Latvia, notes that “Flexible digital consent allows study participants to maintain control over their participation in the study by calmly reading through the informed consent document and signing or rescinding it at any time. Due to this opportunity, people will have greater confidence in researchers and science as a whole.”
Longenesis Engage
With a single click on the research organization link, Engage makes onboarding new patients much simpler.
Engage also allows for the management of patients’ contact information to answer follow-up questions, as well as the management of their consent throughout their participation in the research studies. It also includes tools for exporting and monitoring data, which allow to carry out analysis throughout medical research.
Longenesis traction
It has already implemented its solutions with multiple governments, biopharmaceutical companies, and academic consortia in the European Union, the Middle East, and Asia, providing data curation and patient interaction services to the public.
A partnership with Medtronic has also been announced by the company. This partnership, which also includes diabetic patient organizations, will serve as a pilot for digitalizing the patient engagement in research and advocacy initiatives.
“Although advocacy is an important component of the patient organization’s work, it has proven to be a significant source of frustration until this point. We must engage patients in an ongoing dialogue if we are to ensure that their needs and wishes are taken seriously and that their best interests are placed first. Numerous factors impede this process, including their varying abilities as well as the distrust that comes with any chronic illness. As a result, we are thrilled to be collaborating with Longenesis on this initiative. We believe that their patient engagement and data curation solutions will provide us with the necessary access not only to diabetic patients but also to research partners who may be able to assist them in meeting their requirements. And we are hopeful that the current project is only the beginning,” Indra Stelmane, Ph.D., a leading endocrinologist and the President of the Latvian Diabetes Federation, explains.
Longenesis supporters
LongeVC is an important driving force behind Longenesis. With a focus on industrial development, fundraising, and start-up development, LongeVC acts as an investment fund for biotech startups.
One of the primary goals of LongeVC is to identify and fund innovative companies in the field of longevity science and technology. LongeVC’s Managing Partner, Garri Zmudze, makes the following observation:
“Access to clinical data and patient cohorts in accordance with regulatory requirements will continue to be the most important success factor for any biotech or longevity-focused venture. We believe that Longenesis has everything to become the backbone of compliant biomedical data utilization in the coming years.”
On the role of digitalization in biotechnology and medical research, Rustam Gilfanov, a business angel and a Venture Partner of the LongeVC investment fund, who led the investment round, says as follows:
“In today’s world, biotechnology is advancing at a rapid pace, moving away from processes that were previously entirely dependent on humans’ actions and excessively manual. Recent breakthroughs in artificial intelligence-driven drug discovery are an excellent example of this, and there will be many more in the near future. For such repeatable and scalable innovations, digitalization, transparency, and compliance in the access to biomedical data assets are required. Developing such businesses is one of the goals of the fund. This is the direction in which we are going.”
