adsilico, a British company that uses artificial intelligence to create virtual patients for testing medical devices, has raised £10 million in a Series A funding round, as it seeks to make device trials faster, cheaper and more representative of the people who will ultimately use them.
The round, announced on 26 October, was led by PXN Ventures, with participation from existing investors Northern Gritstone and Parkwalk.
adsilico is a spinout from the University of Leeds, founded in 2024 by Sheena Macpherson, its chief executive, together with Dr Nishant Ravikumar and Dr Zeike Taylor.
Virtual Hearts and Blood Vessels
The company's platform, called Virtual Chimera, uses generative AI to create virtual hearts and blood vessels based on anonymised clinical scans. Combined with physics-based simulations, it allows medical device manufacturers to test how their products perform across virtual populations that vary by age, sex, ethnicity, body size and medical conditions.
Manufacturers can use the platform to determine the right range of device sizes, identify patients who may be at higher risk of complications and refine clinical trial strategies. adsilico says this can surface problems earlier, support more targeted studies and potentially reduce reliance on animal testing.
Solving the Diversity Problem in Device Trials
The technology addresses a long-standing problem in medical device development. Clinical trials for devices such as heart valves and stents typically involve only a few hundred patients, making it difficult to represent the full diversity of people who will receive the device. Recruiting patients from different demographic groups is costly and slow.
As a result, devices may be tested predominantly on certain populations, and their performance in others, including women and ethnic minorities, may be less well understood. Differences in anatomy, such as the size and shape of hearts and blood vessels, can affect how devices fit and function.
"Patients miss out on the chance of a life-saving device, or face uncertainty about whether it will work for them," Macpherson said, describing the consequences of trials that fail to reflect patient diversity.
A Woman Leading Medtech Innovation
Macpherson's leadership of adsilico places her among a growing but still small group of women leading AI and medtech companies in the UK. Women remain under-represented among founders of venture-backed technology companies, and particularly in deep-tech fields that combine engineering, data science and medicine.
The company's focus on diversity in clinical evidence resonates with long-standing concerns about the under-representation of women in medical research. Women were historically excluded from many clinical trials, and differences in how diseases present and how treatments work in women have often been overlooked, including in cardiovascular medicine.
Early Commercial Traction
adsilico has completed projects with manufacturers of heart valves and neurovascular devices, and its cardiac research is scheduled to be presented at TCT, a major conference focused on structural heart therapies.
The company plans to use the new funding to further develop its virtual heart models, expand into neurovascular devices, including flow diverters used to treat brain aneurysms, and grow its workforce as it moves into additional therapeutic areas.
The Rise of In Silico Trials
adsilico is part of a broader movement towards in silico trials, the use of computer simulations to supplement or partially replace traditional testing in medical product development. Regulators have shown increasing openness to computational evidence. The US Food and Drug Administration has published guidance on assessing the credibility of computational modelling in medical device submissions, and has encouraged approaches that reduce animal testing.
Virtual patient models cannot entirely replace human trials, but they can help companies design better trials, identify potential problems earlier and test devices across a wider range of scenarios than would be practical with real patients alone.
Northern Innovation
The round also highlights the growth of the innovation ecosystem in northern England. Northern Gritstone, an investment company backed by the universities of Leeds, Manchester and Sheffield, was created to commercialise research from northern universities. PXN Ventures, the lead investor, manages funds focused on technology businesses in the North of England.
The UK government has sought to promote economic growth outside London and the South East, and university spinouts are a key part of that strategy.
Relevance for India
The challenge adsilico addresses is highly relevant to India. Medical devices are often developed and tested primarily on Western populations, and differences in body size and anatomy may affect how devices perform in Indian patients. Virtual patient models built on diverse data, including from South Asian populations, could help ensure that devices are suitable for patients in India and other regions.
India's growing medical device industry and its large patient population also make it a potential market for in silico testing platforms, as Indian manufacturers seek approval in domestic and international markets.
The Business Model
adsilico's customers are medical device manufacturers, ranging from large multinational companies to smaller firms developing specialised products. The company works on projects that help manufacturers answer specific questions about device design, sizing and patient selection, generating evidence that can inform development decisions and regulatory submissions.
For manufacturers, the value proposition is reduced cost and risk. Clinical trials for cardiovascular devices can cost tens of millions of dollars and take years, and failures discovered late in development are particularly expensive. Simulating device performance across thousands of virtual patients early in development could help companies identify problems before committing to costly trials, and design trials that are more likely to succeed. As regulators become more accustomed to computational evidence, the role of virtual testing in device development is likely to grow, potentially creating a substantial market for companies with validated platforms.
What Comes Next
With £10 million in new funding, adsilico will expand its platform and customer base, moving into new device categories and therapeutic areas. Its success will depend on demonstrating that virtual patient testing can reliably predict real-world outcomes and gaining acceptance from regulators and manufacturers.
For a company founded only two years ago, the Series A marks significant progress. For patients who have historically been under-represented in medical research, technologies like adsilico's offer the prospect of devices designed and tested with them in mind.
