Adverse effects of prescription drugs generate between 10,000 and 20,000 deaths per year in France, and more than 150,000 hospitalizations. Bordeaux-based Synapse Medicine‘s mission is to solve this problem by democratising access to medical information and helping doctors to write the right prescriptions with its AI platform. Founded in 2017, the startup has raised its first round of €2.5 million, led by XAnge.
Co-founded by two doctors, Clément Goehrs and Louis Letinier, and an engineer, Bruno Thiao-Layel, Synapse Medicine’s online platform offers an intelligent virtual medical assistant that doctors can ask about drugs to obtain information pertinent to their patients and prescriptions.
“It’s really like a Google Drug Assistant,“ said Dr. Goehrs. “You can ask it all kinds of questions like, ‘Can I use this medicine for this situation?’ ‘What is the recommended dose for this medicine?’, or ‘What are the contraindications?'”
The platform is also able to analyse a prescription that has already been prescribed. “Just take a photo of the prescription with your smartphone to learn about drugs that may not be appropriate for specific reasons, such as dosing or interactions with other drugs on the list. The doctor can then adjust it very quickly,” said Dr. Goehrs.
The platform provides answers based on an analysis of more than 30,000 referenced medical documents. Its algorithms scan thousands of files, and using Natural Language Processing, the information from the documents is translated and structured into a large database that users can access.
“We responded to a real need on the ground, and this was verified by our users, composed of 350 doctors, during the six months of our test phase,” added Goehrs.
“We were impressed by the very positive feedback from the first users,” added Guillaume Meulle, Associate Director at XAnge. “Synapse puts doctors in the hands of a powerful technology that is easy to use and saves time.”
Th funding will allow Synapse Medicine to strengthen its team by recruiting talent to accelerate its commercial launch, and to facilitate the development of new features on the platform.
