We have seen how the use of AI has become widespread in the medical and healthcare sector as well and now we are seeing one of the big players in the tech industry, Sheryl Sandberg, backing an AI healthcare startup named Cercle. Cercle is aiming to use AI in healthcare, specifically women healthcare right now, in order to help make better decisions. While the details are few and far in between right now, the company was kind enough to provide more information on what it does actually and we have reported it down below. The report states, “Cercle uses artificial intelligence to try and advance women’s health, particularly within fertility care. The company’s platform organizes unstructured medical data, such as medical records and test results, into a standardized format for fertility doctors and researchers, hoping it will help clinicians develop more personalized treatment plans and accelerate new discoveries in pharmaceuticals.”
Giving an example to give us better knowledge of what it does, Cercle states that “if a patient wants to freeze her eggs, her doctor can use Cercle’s platform to look at data from similar patients who have also had their eggs frozen. The information is de-identified and anonymous, according to Cercle, but the physician can see what kind of treatments helped or didn’t, then use that information to develop a more personalized plan of action”.
Cercle CEO and Co-founder Juan Carlos Riveiro say, “That’s the founding mission behind Cercle, to personalize and contextualize biomedical and genomics information so women can make better, more informed health decisions”. After leaving Meta last year, Sheryl Sandberg has been “investing, supporting, and scaling alongside great entrepreneurs,” as per her LinkedIn page. She is one of the lead investors in Cercle as well. Cercle is also partnering with the genetics company Eurofins Genoma and US Fertility, the nation’s largest fertility network that supports more than 100 clinics. Cercle said it will initially focus on fertility care but plans to expand to other areas within women’s health. At the moment, there is no information about Cercle’s funding rounds or its expansion plans but we will know about it very soon.