A Kanata software firm that’s making it easier for researchers around the world to learn more about the virus that causes COVID-19 has landed a big funding boost from the federal government.
Evidence Partners announced this week it’s received $900,000 in new financing through the federal government’s FedDev Ontario regional development agency.
The company has seen demand for its platform that streamlines the medical research process for academics, health organizations and other agencies skyrocket during the pandemic. The software, known as DistillerSR, uses artificial intelligence to sort through reams of medical research files and aggregate the most relevant studies in a fraction of the time it would take a person to perform the same task manually.
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“This additional financing will play a critical role in expanding our footprint in the global medical device regulatory market and the health economics research market,” CEO Peter O’Blenis said in a statement.
“We continue to see increasing demand for DistillerSR as medical researchers seek to automate the manual, error-prone, and time-consuming literature review process – a cornerstone for evidence-based research and vital for organizations currently conducting research on COVID-19.”
The company says 57 global health-care organizations have been using DistillerSR to conduct COVID-19 research. Evidence Partners has also provided medical researchers with a free data set consisting of nearly 65,000 references identified by DistillerSR from more than 200,000 citations.
In total, more than 260 organizations – including three of the world’s top five pharmaceutical companies and four of the five largest global medical device manufacturers – are now using Evidence Partners’ cloud-based service to help crunch data.
The 55-person firm has been on a tear in 2020. O’Blenis told OBJ last month Evidence Partners is on pace to beat last year’s revenue growth rate of more than 60 per cent despite the pandemic-fuelled global economic slump.
