Adsilico: Yorkshire firm using AI to expand medical device testing raises £10m in funding
A University of Leeds spinout has raised £10m in funding to expand its AI and simulation technology for assessing medical device performance.
Adsilico was founded in 2024 by Sheena Macpherson, Dr Nishant Ravikumar and Dr Zeike Taylor.
The company uses AI to assess the performance of medical devices including heart valves and stents in diverse virtual patient populations.
According to the team behind Adsilico, current clinical trials often disproportionately assess distinct groups of people, with certain groups more difficult to reach. The company hopes that its technology will provide data for more broad groups, allowing for better information on how a device will behave without expensive and complex trials.
The funding round was led by PXN Ventures, with existing investors Northern Gritstone and Parkwalk also taking part.
Ms Macpherson said: “Patients miss out on the chance of a life-saving device, or face uncertainty about whether it will work for them, because people like them weren’t represented when it was designed and tested. We give medical device manufacturers early insight into the impact of anatomical diversity when it can still shape the design and help avoid costly mistakes or harm to patients.”
Heart valves, stents and other implants usually reach the market after clinical trials of a few hundred patients.
A study in JAMA Internal Medicine of 195 trials of high-risk implants found that women made up just 33 per cent of participants, falling to 29 per cent in cardiovascular trials.
Adsilico’s Virtual Chimera technology uses generative AI to build realistic virtual hearts and blood vessels from anonymised clinical scans. It then runs physics-based simulations of how a device behaves inside each one, under clinical oversight, across a virtual population that reflects real variation in age, sex, ethnicity, body size and disease.
The company hopes medical device manufacturers can use these insights to inform strategic decisions, such as which sizes of a device they need to make for the patients it is intended for, or identify target patients who may be at higher risk before they commit to further development or recruitment into clinical trials.
The funding will extend the company’s work on heart models and take it into devices for the brain, such as flow diverters used to treat brain aneurysms, where trial numbers are smallest.
Adsilico – which is based at Nexus, the University of Leeds’ innovation hub – also plans to grow its team from 14 to 34 people.
Dr Elizabeth Young, Investment Manager at PXN Ventures, said: "What Sheena and the team have built has the potential to have a significant global impact for medical device manufacturers, the pre-clinical development process and, therefore most important of all, patients.”