Realyze Intelligence Named to CancerX Accelerator Inaugural Class

Realyze Intelligence Named to CancerX Accelerator Inaugural Class

PITTSBURGH, Feb. 26, 2024 – Realyze Intelligence has earned a position among the inaugural class of start-up companies selected for the CancerX Startup Accelerator, part of the Biden administration Cancer Moonshot program that aims to cut the U.S. cancer death rate in half within the next 25 years. This is the first-ever national cancer innovation accelerator initiative with public support from the White House.

The first cohort of the CancerX Startup Accelerator was announced today at ViVE, a digital health conference in Los Angeles. The highly competitive program gives Realyze Intelligence, which uses artificial intelligence (AI) to efficiently match cancer patients to clinical trials, access to connections and collaborations with leading cancer organizations to help fortify its innovative technology.

“The CancerX initiative is going to have a huge impact on our oncology partners and we’re excited and honored to be among the first companies to join the CancerX Accelerator program,” said Aaron Brauser, founder, president and CEO of Realyze Intelligence. “Clinical trials play such a key role in advancing treatment for cancer. Realyze’s ability to accelerate trials and bring an understanding to the patient’s condition in real time is a key part of improving patient care today and fast-tracking drug development for tomorrow.”

Realyze Intelligence applied for the CancerX Accelerator program after it was announced last year. The three-stage selection process included fit assessment to the goals of CancerX and proposed solution viability assessment by business, technology and oncology experts. Ultimately, 16 startups were named to the inaugural class.

Realyze Intelligence was cofounded in 2020 by Brauser and Gilan El Saadawi, M.D., chief medical officer, and is a UPMC Enterprises portfolio company. By combining clinically guided large language models, data standards, Fast Healthcare Interoperability Resources (FHIR) and AI, Realyze tools rapidly read and summarize the unstructured portion of a patient’s electronic health record to identify cancer patients who match open clinical trials in seconds, rather than hours.

Every year, two million people are diagnosed with cancer in the U.S. and $2 billion in research funding is spent on clinical trials. Oncology care and drug development rely on the timely accrual of patients into these clinical trials, which can offer patients access to the latest, potentially life-saving treatments. Successful trials can then make those more effective treatments available to exponentially more patients.

With the advent of precision oncology, qualification criteria for oncology clinical trials has increased in complexity and stringency, but both patient referral and screening are largely manual and non-standardized processes. Collectively, this creates an oncology environment where 85% of clinical trials experience a delay and 20% to 40% fail due to struggles enrolling patients. Only 5% to 6% of cancer patients successfully make it into a clinical trial.

“Realyze can increase trial enrollment 10-fold by auto-matching patients before their appointments, allowing their oncologists to discuss enrollment and address concerns during appointments, rather than days or weeks later,” Brauser said. “And, by using clinical records to match the right patient with the right trial, we can enhance study outcomes.”

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About Realyze

Realyze Intelligence enables healthcare organizations and vendors to clinical understand patients and patient populations in a more precise way. Applying the latest AI technologies alongside a sophisticated clinical knowledgebase, Realyze models the patient story by unlocking the information from across the entire patient chart, including narrative notes. The Realyze platform is built to serve a variety of applications from automating abstraction to improving care by identifying a patient’s true clinical condition. Realyze Intelligence was co-founded by Aaron Brauser, M.B.A., and Gilan El Saadawi, M.D., and is a UPMC Enterprises portfolio company. Learn more at realyzeintelligence.com.