Truveta, a startup that pools and analyzes patient data for research and drug development, launched its platform Tuesday with $200 million in funding and new research on COVID-19 breakthrough infections.
Created earlier this year, the company is backed by 20 health systems including big names like Tenet Health, Providence and CommonSpirit Health, representing more than 16% of patient care in the U.S.
The Seattle-based startup collects and sells data from its provider groups, with the information normalized and de-identified to protect patient privacy and security.
The startup previously landed $95 million in its series A funding round in July. At its launch Tuesday, the company said its total funding had risen to $200 million.
Truveta uses machine learning to structure clinical data into an FHIR model for faster insights, and the platform updates daily with new data.
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The company also released insights from COVID-19 data collected from the partnering health systems. Due to the siloed nature of clinical data in the U.S., many decisions made for managing the COVID-19 pandemic relied on data from other countries that may not reflect the country’s diverse population, said Terry Myerson, Truveta CEO and former Microsoft executive.
“With the moral imperative to address this significant gap, Truveta was born from innovative health systems who came together to deliver an unprecedented national dataset for U.S. health,” he said in a statement. “Now, Truveta is sharing the first COVID-19 insights in the U.S. using real-time data, representing a major step forward in realizing our vision of saving lives with data.”
An analysis of 1.7 million fully vaccinated patients on Truveta’s platform showed vaccinated people with diabetes, chronic lung disease or chronic kidney disease or who are immunocompromised are nearly twice as likely to be hospitalized from breakthrough COVID-19 infections than the general vaccinated population.
The startup also found that 9% of Pfizer vaccinated patients and 15% of Johnson & Johnson vaccinated patients who have COVID-19 breakthrough infections are hospitalized.
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However, adverse events occur in less than 1% of fully vaccinated patients, the results showed, meaning the risk of severe illness due to COVID-19 in a vaccinated person is far less than 1%.
“In just under two weeks, our team was able to ask and answer important medical questions using one of the largest comprehensive real-time datasets of fully vaccinated Americans,” said Nick Stucky, M.D., Ph.D., director of clinical research at Truveta and an infectious diseases physician at Providence Portland Medical Center. “I’m energized by the opportunity the Truveta Platform can offer to physicians like me and clinical researchers around the world to discover solutions to health problems at new levels of speed and accuracy. We invite other researchers to join us to explore and expand on these insights.”
Truveta plans to continue to expand its platform in the coming months. The startup announced a partnership with Microsoft in September to use its Azure cloud for Truveta’s clinical data platform.
Microsoft also invested an undisclosed amount in the startup.
The tech giant, along with other big tech players like Google and Amazon Web Services, has continued its push into healthcare with this partnership and other strategic moves to provide cloud computing and data storage technology to hospitals and health systems.