Australian digital health company WeGuide has secured $1.95 million in CUREator+ funding to develop a platform designed to speed up the development and commercialisation of multi-modal digital biomarkers.
The platform will use AI-powered agentic workflows to automate parts of the biomarker development process, including data cleaning and the generation of algorithmic variants from multi-modal datasets.
WeGuide says the technology is intended to reduce work that can currently take months to days, covering the process from study design and data collection through to clinical validation and commercial deployment.
The company will develop its first use case in partnership with Neuroscience Research Australia (NeuRA), focused on a digital biomarker for mobility recovery.
The study will recruit participants from rehabilitation settings and combine data from wrist-worn wearable devices with patient-reported outcomes.
Results will be validated against the Short Physical Performance Battery, a standard clinical assessment of physical function and mobility.
NeuRA senior principal research scientist and UNSW Sydney Professor Kim Delbaere said digital biomarkers had significant potential for monitoring patient recovery, but their development remained a barrier.
“Digital biomarkers have huge potential to improve how we monitor patient recovery, but the development process has been a real barrier,” Prof Delbaere said.
“If we can show that a platform approach produces clinically valid results, it opens doors for researchers everywhere who want to bring their biomarker ideas to life.”
WeGuide said its platform would provide an end-to-end approach to biomarker development, including data fusion, study design, data collection, clinical validation and deployment.
The company has previously deployed its patient engagement platform as part of Generation Victoria (GenV), a longitudinal birth cohort study that has recruited more than 120,000 families.
WeGuide founder and CEO Sanji Kanagalingam said researchers developing precision medicine tools could face technical, regulatory and algorithm development barriers.
“Talented researchers with brilliant ideas for precision medicine get stuck on technical infrastructure, regulatory complexity, and months of manual algorithm development,” Mr Kanagalingam said.
“Our platform transforms biomarker development from a custom, one-off project into a standardised, automated process, much like cloud computing transformed software deployment.”
The CUREator+ funding will be used for product development, medical device certification and infrastructure expansion.
WeGuide said researchers using the platform would retain ownership of their biomarker algorithms.
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