OpenEvidence just inked a major partnership as it breaks into drug development, and it didn’t even make a fuss about the mega-round it raised to fuel it.
Let’s start with the partnership. OpenEvidence is teaming up with Memorial Sloan Kettering and was generous with the details when explaining the move to Forbes.
- The collaboration itself was fairly straightforward. MSK is plugging OE into its Epic workflows, and OE is integrating MSK’s OncoKB precision oncology database into its engine to let physicians access the treasure trove of data on genetic variants of different cancers and their treatments.
The fine print was huge. A single sentence bolted onto a paragraph in the middle of the Forbes article revealed that OE quietly raised $250M at a $15B valuation last week. For context:
- January – $250M at $12B, with a big announcement and press tour for CEO Daniel Nadler.
- July – The Information reported OE was weighing a $200M raise at $20B.
- September – $250M at $15B, revealed in a blurb sandwiched between partner coverage.
Not necessarily a down round, but the silence was deafening. Especially considering how much other OE news has been hitting the wire recently:
- a new family of four AI models featuring Darwin, the first AI in history to score a perfect 100% on the MedQA benchmark.
- a partnership with Anthropic to give physicians in 100 lower-income countries open access to OE’s clinical decision support.
But wait, there’s more. Nadler told Forbes that OE plans to start developing its own oncology therapies, with the first drug entering clinical trials before year-end and another three candidates on the way next year, starting with rare cancers.
- Bit of a head scratcher, but OE isn’t planning to compete with Lilly or Pfizer on 10,000-patient trials. It’s going after “the stuff that they are not doing, and maybe can’t do” because they don’t have OE’s “economies of scale in finding these patients.”
Why go after drug development? Probably the same reason as the funding radio silence – competition is compounding.
- As OE expands from clinical search into nearby workflows, it’s not only bumping up against Wolters Kluwer and Elsevier, it’s also competing with new heavyweights like Abridge and Doximity.
- Abridge has giant friends in the pharma space and is only making more, while Doximity just reported a blowout quarter on the back of its solutions that compete directly with OE.
- Doximity’s call also snuck in a rumor that an unnamed “major system” is cracking down on shadow AI and banning a product from a direct competitor. Maybe OE, maybe true.
The Takeaway
For all the AI fearmongering that’s been going on recently, it’s nice to see OpenEvidence randomly decide to cure cancer, regardless of the valuation it hit while funding the new quest.
