The Singapore-based platform in which Milltrust is investing focuses on generating real-time leads in trials, speeding up the diagnosis process and removing inefficiencies of existing cancer trials.

Milltrust Ventures, part of Milltrust International Group, has put Dr Bernard Ng, its chief scientific officer, on the advisory board of Oncoshot, a Singapore-based health insights exchange platform using AI.

Oncoshot uses its proprietary clinical trial matching AI technology to handle inefficiencies of cancer clinical trials. The platform links regional healthcare institutions and contract research organisations and global biotechnology and pharmaceutical companies so that data-driven cancer clinical trials can be handled efficiently.

The platform generates hospital-approved real-time leads for trials in minutes, sorting through more than 100,000 de-identified patient profiles spanning its three initial markets. With the traditional approach, this process can take weeks to months. Cutting time spent in the enrolment stages can save clinical trial stakeholders tens of thousands of dollars per day, Milltrust said in a statement yesterday. 

Milltrust Ventures screens and identifies startups from the UK and rest of Europe, as well as from Asia, particularly Singapore. This news service recently interviewed Milltrust International about its business.

"Milltrust Ventures is proud to be an investor for Oncoshot. We see the value this health insights platform can bring to the field of cancer clinical trials globally and Oncoshot's potential in bringing this system to fruition," Dr Ng said, "starting with enabling patients to be matched with trials in near real-time and at a later stage, generating insights from the wealth of data for real-world evidence to help the way we fight cancer on a population and individual level."

Before his role at Milltrust Ventures, Dr Ng was Bayer Consumer Healthcare's vice president and head of global medical and clinical affairs. As a veteran of the medical and clinical affairs industry, he will bring 23 years of global, regional, and local experience to Oncoshot.

Dr Ng is joining Curie oncology senior consultant and medical oncologist Dr John Chia; Ekomed Technologies CEO John McKendry; and Supra Oncology founder and former Pfizer MD Srini Srinivasan in guiding Oncoshot.

Oncoshot was founded in 2018 by Dr Huren Sivaraj, a medical oncologist, and Ruslan Enikeev, a data science engineer and creator of Map of the Internet – a popular web traffic data-visualization tool.