Pr3vent closes Series A funding round for AI development

Pr3vent, which is developing artificial intelligence for early detection of preventable vision loss in healthy term newborn infants, closed a round of Series A financing led by InFocus Capital Partners.

“This financing round puts Pr3vent in a strong position to create a profitable AI solution in the ophthalmic space,” Pr3vent CEO Jochen Kumm, PhD, said in a press release.

The Pr3vent AI technology is under development as a noninvasive retinal screening tool intended to identify pathology in newborns.

“We are in the process of finalizing our database curation and our algorithm, which is a deep learning classifier that will grade images as normal or abnormal,” Darius M. Moshfeghi, MD, co-founder of Pr3vent, told Healio.com/OSN.

The next steps will be to proceed down the regulatory pathway, meeting with the FDA and developing a clinical study, he said.

“Ultimately, Pr3vent would like to screen every newborn for eye disease, just like it is performed for hearing. Every baby in the United States is screened for hearing abnormalities. That is 4 million live births screened in the hospital,” Moshfeghi said.

For eye care, world literature to date reports an overall incidence of non-hemorrhagic pathologies to be 3.91% and foveal hemorrhages to be 3%, according to Moshfeghi, who is editor-in-chief of OSLI Retina.

“Right there you have almost 7% pathology,” most of which is “actionable,” Moshfeghi said.

In contrast, hearing screening finds an incidence of pathology of 0.1% to 0.6%, he said.

“This is an opportunity to improve care for newborns nationwide,” Moshfeghi said. – by Scott Buzby

Disclosures: Moshfeghi and Kumm report they are co-founders of Pr3vent.