The Spark – The Technology Prize: This start-up gets pharmaceutical rivals to share data

Munich. New active ingredients, tailored therapies, earlier diagnoses: one of the greatest promises of AI is its added value for medical progress. However, pharmaceutical companies and research institutions are reluctant to share the data required for this - which makes the development of algorithms and models more difficult.

Apheris wants to offer the industry a way out of the dilemma. The Berlin start-up enables pharmaceutical companies with decentralized networks to research drugs without the partners involved revealing confidential data. The models are trained directly at the source, and the results – specifically: the model parameters – are merged later.

With this concept, Apheris took third place in the “The Spark” technology award from Handelsblatt and McKinsey on Thursday. The jury praised the “fundamental new approach” to drug development. The breakthrough lies not in a new AI model, but in access to the data.

Company boss Robin Röhm identified the problem in his first start-up Janus Genomics: There he noticed how difficult it was to exchange confidential patient data in research. This became a business idea, and in 2019 he founded a new company with Michael Höh.