VitArk Health Files for IPO: Pioneering Integrated Biomedical Data Platform for Precision Medicine in China

Life Singularity is a startup dedicated to innovation in precision medicine big data. Founded in 2015, the company leverages multidisciplinary approaches—including natural language processing, machine learning, clinical informatics, and bioinformatics—to deeply integrate clinical phenotypic data with omics data, thereby extracting insights from data to advance clinical practice and scientific research.

Liu Liyu, Founder and CEO, stated: “Our vision is to apply biomedical big data technology to drive development in key sectors of the healthcare industry, making healthcare services more precise, efficient, and accessible, so that everyone can receive dignified, high-quality healthcare.”

Before founding Life Singularity, Liu Liyu served as CEO of PKU Healthcare IT, a well-known healthcare informatics company in China. During his five-year tenure at PKU Healthcare IT, Liu Liyu, a graduate of the Department of Computer Science at Peking University, developed a profound understanding of clinical information. It was also during this period that he met Professor Shi Yu, Director of the Center for Quantitative Sciences at Vanderbilt University, a voting expert on the U.S. FDA’s Drug Advisory Committee, and Deputy Editor-in-Chief of JAMA Oncology. Professor Shi had been one of the key leaders involved in the entire development process of the Vanderbilt Institute for Precision Medicine Big Data Center, one of the most successful precision medicine big data initiatives in the United States. Through his interactions with Professor Shi, Liu Liyu recognized the value derived from the deep integration of clinical data and omics data, as well as the opportunities such data integration presented in China. This inspired him to embark on an entrepreneurial journey in medical big data. Subsequently, he invited internationally renowned bioinformatics expert Professor Zhang Zemin and others to serve as co-founders and advisors. He also successfully persuaded his former classmates from Peking University—Xu Hui, a pioneer of Baidu’s commercial search and chief architect of the Fengchao system, and Dr. Tong Weiwei, a Peking University alumnus who returned to China after studying in the United States—to join him, forming a cross-disciplinary founding team.

Liu Liyu believes that the entire healthcare sector has high expectations for the value of big data applications, whether in terms of the supply capacity of medical and health services or the R&D efficiency of medical and health products. Within this context, data integration is a critical hurdle that must be overcome for data analysis and utilization. The integration of clinical data itself is particularly crucial and presents many challenges. Meanwhile, integrating phenotypic information with omics data is also of paramount importance. According to a study by the U.S. Institute of Medicine (IOM), a significant portion of the information underlying today’s professional decisions and judgments regarding disease and health already consists of molecular biology data, along with human phenotypic information, with the proportion of bioinformatics data continuing to grow. This is precisely why Life Singularity has chosen the integration of clinical phenotypic information and omics data as its core strategic focus for business and technological development from the outset.

The concept of medical big data has been touted for many years, yet its practical implementation faces numerous obstacles without significant breakthroughs. Heterogeneity, fragmentation, lack of standardization, and unstructured nature of clinical information; heavy reliance on manual data entry in clinical research; absence of unified analytical pipelines, quality control standards, and parameter thresholds for omics data; and inadequate operational management specifications for biospecimen management, coupled with the failure to achieve a closed-loop integration with clinical and experimental data—all these factors severely constrain healthcare institutions’ ability to effectively leverage these data resources for clinical research and translation.

Based on an analysis of these “pain points,” Life Singularity officially launched VitArk 16, China’s first biomedical big data software platform, in December 2016. It provides healthcare institutions with an integrated platform for multidimensional data integration and analytics. The platform can be used for the integration and analysis of clinical big data, and also supports the integrated utilization of clinical data, omics information, and biobank data.

Taking the utilization of data in clinical scientific research as an example, the traditional workflow relies entirely on researchers to propose hypotheses first. Subsequently, samples and data are collected according to these hypotheses—a process involving extensive and cumbersome manual data entry—followed by statistical analysis. If the analytical results fail to adequately support the initial hypothesis, the entire project may need to be restarted from scratch. In contrast, a big data platform can automatically accumulate various historical clinical data and biological sample resources. It can also automatically extract key information required for scientific research and clinical applications based on specialized clinical business models, thereby creating a rich data repository. This not only stimulates researchers to generate diverse ideas and insights (forming research "hypotheses") but also enables rapid preliminary validation of hypothesis feasibility through retrospective studies leveraging large case volumes. Throughout this process, research strategies can be adjusted quickly and flexibly, making the scientific research process iterative and agile.

“If researchers are master chefs, then we are responsible for preparing all the ingredients, enabling them to unleash their creativity and craft a variety of exquisite dishes,” said Liu Liyu.

Similarly, for clinical decision support, since the VitArk big data platform has already structured and modeled raw clinical, follow-up, and bioinformatics data, it continuously constructs and refines knowledge graphs based on real-world data. This enables the delivery of clinical decision support that combines data-driven and knowledge-base-driven approaches, tailored to clinical needs and integrated with Life Singularity’s data analytics services.

Currently, the company is collaborating with dozens of hospitals, including Tianjin Medical University Cancer Institute and Hospital, to provide a comprehensive biomedical big data solution for scientific research, clinical practice, and operational management.

Although such efforts cannot resolve all the contradictions in current clinical translational research, building a robust big data platform for precision medicine can integrate the processes of discovery, validation, and application, forming a closed loop of continuous optimization. “From the clinic, to the clinic,” data derived from clinical practice can more intuitively support clinical research and application needs, enabling researchers to align their translational studies more closely with clinical realities.

A precision medicine big data platform built on a robust top-level design can not only support exploratory discovery but also effectively facilitate clinical applications, providing systematic support for hospitals to establish their own Precision Medicine Programs. For instance, it assists clinicians in selecting appropriate molecular testing products and interpreting molecular diagnostic results, supports tumor board consultations, and evaluates treatment plans and prognoses by integrating clinical guidelines with historical real-world data, among other functions.

In terms of clinical translation, Life Singularity has also begun collaborating with select partner hospitals to develop next-generation sequencing (NGS) clinical testing panels tailored for the Chinese population, leveraging indigenous biological information and phenotypic data. Additionally, further confirmatory clinical studies are being conducted on potential clinical biomarkers.

“Many hospitals in the United States have already established biomedical big data platforms and achieved remarkable results, which offer valuable lessons for China,” said Liu Liyu. “In fact, many frontline clinical experts have excellent ideas for clinical research and translation, but they lack adequate supporting resources and infrastructure. Therefore, we aim to make efforts in this area to reduce the difficulties associated with integrating various stakeholders.”

Liu Liyu believes that with the increasing number of practical application cases of medical big data, as well as the popularization and promotion of biotechnologies such as gene sequencing in clinical applications, more and more hospitals will pay attention to the construction of biomedical big data platforms.

The company secured tens of millions of yuan in angel funding at its inception. It is reported that the Series A financing round is currently nearing completion.