LinkingMed Secures Several Million USD in Series A Funding to Advance AI-Powered Oncology Solutions

VCBeat has learned that,Beijing Lianxin Medical Co., Ltd. has recently completed a multi-million-dollarAround of financing, with Linear Capital as the investor. The funds will be used forAIR&D of Technologies for Tumor Diagnosis and Treatment.

Two tasks in the tumor treatment process consume a significant amount of doctors' time and energy: target volume delineation and treatment plan design. Using traditional methods, this process typically takes doctors 3 to 5 hours.

Although target volume delineation and treatment plan design require a certain level of technical expertise and experience, these labor-intensive tasks are precisely where artificial intelligence excels. Leveraging AI for these processes will significantly save oncologists' time. Currently, Lianxin Medical has three products:

First,Establishment of an Oncology Information SystemIntegrate data generated across various systems and stages of tumor treatment, enabling all medical staff—from physicians to medical physicists, dosimetrists, and nurses—to access each patient’s information in real time within a unified system, thereby ensuring control over treatment quality. Through systematic and standardized workflows, originally unstructured data can be converted into structured data.

Leveraging big data analytics and related algorithms, the system can automatically delineate target volumes and verify and monitor radiotherapy trial parameters, dose distributions, and other metrics.

Second,Building a Clinical Oncology Data Center. This is the overall clinical data solution provided by Lianxin Medical.The platform systematically and standardizes the collection of oncology data, converting various unstructured data into structured data to facilitate big data analytics.. This enables oncology professionals to collect and access cancer patient data during treatment with the support of the Oncology Data Cloud Platform, thereby providing more robust data and technical support for oncological research and clinical cancer care.

Third,Development of a Remote Oncology Treatment PlatformThis is a remote therapy platform, not a diagnostic one. It can seamlessly integrate with various existing commercial linear accelerators to deliver more precise, automated, and rapid personalized clinical radiotherapy plans for cancer patients. This aims to improve the cure rate of radiotherapy, reduce damage to normal tissues, ultimately extend the lives of cancer patients, and enhance their quality of life. For oncologists and researchers, this platform provides a comprehensive analytical framework for scientific research, thereby driving advancements in radiotherapy research.

Currently, Lianxin Medical has established partnerships with nine top-tier tertiary hospitals in China, compiling over 10,000 highly standardized cases of tumor treatment data. Leveraging artificial intelligence algorithms, the system can automatically delineate target volumes, plan radiotherapy and surgical protocols, and evaluate the therapeutic efficacy of simulated radiotherapy or surgical plans within just 10 to 20 minutes.

Physicians need only perform reviews and fine-tuning on this basis, improving work efficiency by more than 60%. For cancer types such as breast cancer, nasopharyngeal carcinoma, lung cancer, and liver cancer, the technology is relatively mature, with an overlap rate of over 85% between automatically delineated target volumes and those manually drawn by physicians.

Lianxin Medical is located at the TusStar Incubator in Tsinghua University Science Park, Beijing. Its founder, Dr. Zhang Hua, holds a Ph.D. from the Netherlands Cancer Institute. The company’s core team originates from TARGETMAN, a startup founded in Palo Alto, Silicon Valley, USA, in 2012, and has since integrated key technical personnel from Peking University Health Information (Beida Yixin), mastering core technologies for clinical data centers and integration platforms.

In December 2016, Lianxin Medical announced that it had secured RMB 12 million in angel-round financing, with investors including CAS Capital, Anlong Fund, and Xike Angel Fund.