Reveal Hidden Insights Before They Become News with Applied XL

By Ken Bronfin, Senior Managing Director, Hearst Ventures

In 2011, one of my colleagues here at Hearst was anxiously waiting for stem cell treatment to become commercially available to treat a family member. He asked a neurologist to investigate where and when this would occur. This neurologist spent countless hours scouring the internet to track the progress of this innovative type of treatment. He found this task very difficult as the information was buried in lengthy reports — it was like finding a needle in a haystack. His search was further complicated by the fact that the required information was dispersed across press releases, newsletters, medical journals, and public registries. Without a tool which could filter out the noise, that neurologist struggled to answer my colleague’s basic questions. This is where Applied XL comes into play.

Based in New York, Applied XL is a real-time monitoring and intelligence solution that can identify, aggregate, and explain newsworthy events. The company’s efforts are focused on the life sciences industry. Why? The development process in the life sciences industry is massive in scale (there are three thousand new trials per day) and growing at an unprecedented rate.

Creating, developing, and receiving approval for new drugs can take as long as 10–12 years. During this period, the sponsor and/or principal investigator of a clinical trial is responsible for publishing updates such as changes in the completion date, enrollment figures, results, and delays.

In 2021, there were over 1.5 million changes in the US clinical trials registry alone — that’s an average of over 4,100 updates per day. To put things into perspective, by the time you finish reading this post, that equates to 14 new pieces of information.

These updates are published across multiple sources and reported in an entirely unstructured format. Business professionals from biotech and pharmaceutical companies spend an endless amount of time reviewing these updates using legacy platforms that involve a substantial amount of manual search to answer the following types of questions:

• Are my competitors progressing faster than I expected?
• Are comparable therapies encountering regulatory roadblocks?
• What are the emerging therapeutic areas and interventions?
• How should marketing and commercialization activities be adjusted based on the progress of competing programs?

Applied XL allows its customers to answer such questions. How? First, the company monitors and structures data from multiple sources. Second, it tracks the status of any changes in the data. Third, it dynamically prioritizes those shifts based on expert-trained algorithms. Finally, it proactively provides alerts of noteworthy trends across conditions, interventions, and organizations. Applied XL’s capabilities fast-track critical business decisions in the life sciences industry by revealing competitive insights before they become news. However, what makes Applied XL’s algorithms special is that they are underpinned by computational journalism. This brings me to Francesco Marconi, co-founder and CEO of Applied XL, and the terrific team he has assembled.

I first met Francesco about seven years ago. At the time, he was a media strategist at the Associated Press (AP) working on artificial intelligence and automation. Shortly after, he was appointed as the first R&D chief at the Wall Street Journal, where he leveraged computational journalism methods to help reporters break stories, as well as identify what information was most relevant to their readers.

What is computational journalism? It’s an emerging approach that combines techniques of investigative journalism with machine learning, enabling the reliable sourcing of real-time information at scale. Computational journalists bring journalistic rigor with computational speed. That means being able to develop algorithms that include editorial considerations. It’s not simply about automating data — it’s about interpreting the human meaning in the data.

Applied XL is applying these techniques to numerous life sciences data sources, identifying noteworthy changes in the trajectory of clinical trials, understanding the path they took to get to where they are, and most importantly contextualizing why a certain change is noteworthy.

Applied XL has packaged these algorithms into an intuitive product with Twitter-like information feeds that contain only the most meaningful clinical trial updates. Each trial update is presented in a notecard format and contains information such as the responsible organization, the disease, the intervention, and the trial phase. By clicking through, Applied XL clients can access more granular information such as event timelines, trends, and company information.

The company has an impressive distribution agreement with the medical news publisher, STAT, and has already been used by 700+ users spanning across global pharmaceutical companies, emerging biotech firms and life sciences investment funds.

Today, Applied XL announced its $3.5 million seed round to drive growth and adoption of its business intelligence platform, STAT Trials Pulse. The latest round brings its total funding to $5 million, raised within the last year. Shaneel Parekh and I, here at Hearst Ventures, are proud to lead this round and work with the team alongside STAT, Tuesday Capital and NewLab.