Deep Lens

Deep Lens, founded in 2017 by Simon Arkell, Dave Billiter, TJ Bowen, Michael Coffman, and Jamie Maclennan, operated as a digital healthcare company focused on accelerating patient recruitment for oncology clinical trials. The company originated as a spinout from Nationwide Children's Hospital, where co-founder Dave Billiter, drawing from a 20-year career in healthcare informatics at institutions like Cardinal Health, recognized the persistent challenge of connecting patients with clinical trials. This firsthand experience directly shaped the company's mission.

The company's core offering was VIPER (Virtual Imaging for Patient Evaluation and Recruitment), an AI-driven, cloud-based platform. VIPER was designed to automate the clinical trial screening process by ingesting and analyzing a combination of electronic medical records (EMR), genomic data, and digital pathology reports. By integrating directly with hospital systems and molecular data feeds, the platform could identify eligible cancer patients for specific trials at the moment of their diagnosis. This provided care teams, trial coordinators, and oncologists with immediate visibility into available studies, streamlining a process historically hindered by manual review and resource constraints. The business model centered on providing its platform to biopharmaceutical companies, clinical research organizations (CROs), and healthcare providers, operating a SaaS-based subscription model. The platform's value proposition was its ability to compress study timelines and help bring new therapies to market faster.

In January 2023, Deep Lens was acquired by Paradigm, a healthcare technology firm focused on building a clinical research ecosystem to make trials a standard care option. The acquisition was part of a larger $203 million Series A funding round for Paradigm, co-led by ARCH Venture Partners and General Catalyst. The technology and team from Deep Lens were integrated into Paradigm's platform to enhance its patient recruitment capabilities for oncology trials. Subsequently, in March 2024, Paradigm itself was acquired by Exact Sciences, further integrating the Deep Lens technology into a broader precision oncology portfolio.

Keywords: clinical trial recruitment, oncology, AI in healthcare, digital pathology, patient matching, precision medicine, EMR integration, genomic data analysis, health-tech, CRO services