Unlearn.AI

Unlearn.AI is a San Francisco startup founded in 2017 by former Pfizer principal scientist Charles Fisher. The firm claims to be the first to create 'digital twins' to populate intelligent control arms in clinical studies. In the context of clinical research, Unlearn explains, a digital twin is a "longitudinal, computationally generated clinical record that describes what would have happened if a specific patient received a placebo". Digital twins integrate data from real patients with the aim of replacing them in placebo control groups. By removing the need for placebo-controlled cohorts, they could reduce the number of participants needed for clinical trials. According to the firm, digital twins can also increase study power by decreasing variability, as well as powering secondary endpoints and exploratory analyses and providing additional evidence to understand how each patient responded to an experimental treatment in a trial. Currently, the company is focusing its DiGenesis machine learning platform on Alzheimer's disease and multiple sclerosis - diseases with few or no effective treatment options. Unlearn announced in April 2020 that it had raised $12m in a Series A funding round.