ArcaScience press Q&A with Romain Clément
Summary
ArcaScience, founded by brain cancer survivor Romain Clement, uses AI to transform benefit–risk analysis in drug development. With 100B+ biomedical data points, it helps pharma giants like Sanofi & AstraZeneca speed safer therapies to patients. Fresh off a $7M raise, ArcaScience is expanding in the US, launching patient-facing tools, and setting a new global standard for drug evaluation.- Author Company: ArcaScience
- Author Name: Romain Clement
- Author Website: https://www.arcascience.ai/
PharmiWeb Q&A - Romain Clement
Sept 2025
1. Let’s start with the big picture — what inspired the founding of ArcaScience, and what core mission drives the company today?
ArcaScience has its roots in a very personal journey. Years ago, I was diagnosed with a form of brain cancer and came face-to-face with how hard it is to design treatments truly adapted to individual patients. After my recovery, I became determined to tackle one of the biggest blind spots in drug development: the lack of structured, holistic insight into how new therapies balance benefit and risk.
I founded ArcaScience to harness AI and make biomedical knowledge fully usable. Our mission is to give pharma teams sharper visibility into the real strengths and weaknesses of a drug, and to pinpoint which groups of patients are most likely to benefit. Too many promising treatments fail not because they don’t work, but because decision-makers don’t have the right evidence in time and the right strategy to position their treatments.
Today, we’re the first AI platform capable of delivering instant, evidence-based benefit–risk analysis. Built on more than 100 billion biomedical data points—from clinical trials to real-world evidence—our specialized AI models bring clarity and speed to decisions that used to take months.
2. ArcaScience focuses on the benefit-risk analysis in the pharmaceutical industry, what led you to focus on this particular aspect of the pharma sector?
The problem is simple but massive: benefit–risk evaluation in pharma is still largely fragmented, slow, and incomplete. Even though technology has advanced, decisions are still made using siloed data, late-stage reviews, and very narrow patient evidence.
The result is staggering:
- Around 90% of drug candidates fail, often after a decade of work and billions spent.
- Critical insights get lost in unstructured or unused data sources.
- Even approved drugs are usually tested on only a few thousand patients before being prescribed to millions leading to a high need for risk-mitigation strategies.
And once a drug reaches the market, monitoring remains weak: only a fraction of adverse effects are systematically captured. The industry simply doesn’t have a reliable, structured way to evaluate benefit–risk continuously, across both R&D and real-world use.
This is the gap ArcaScience is filling—bringing an always-on, comprehensive, and evidence-based framework for benefit–risk analysis.
3. The company has seen impressive momentum over the past year. Could you share some key milestones or inflection points that have defined ArcaScience’s growth to date?
It’s been an intense and exciting period. Some milestones we’re proud of include:
- Building a client base of 10 pharma leaders, such as Sanofi, AstraZeneca, GSK, Takeda, ICON, and the Paris Brain Institute.
- Joining a pan-European AI consortium to fight pediatric brain cancer, initiated by Sanofi and Imagine for Margo, alongside Roche, Merck, the Institut Gustave Roussy, and other world-class research centers.
- Extending our platform to 70,000+ patients in chronic dermatology, and adoption by clinical and pharmacovigilance teams to derisk trials and strengthen safety monitoring.
- Being selected by the French government during the COVID-19 pandemic to structure and deliver the entire body of scientific knowledge on the virus—a strong validation of our technology.
- Publishing in peer-reviewed scientific journals, confirming the robustness and impact of our approach.
4. You recently announced a $7M funding round. How will this funding round enhance ArcaScience’s growth?
We see benefit–risk prediction as a fundamental building block for the future of drug development. With this investment, we’ll be accelerating on several fronts:
- Expanding our footprint in the US to set a new standard for drug evaluation.
- Launching our second patient-facing solution, with initial focus areas in pediatric brain cancer and skin diseases.
- Strengthening our leadership team with a Chief Medical Officer to translate our AI models into measurable clinical outcomes.
This funding enables us to scale both the product and the impact—bringing benefit–risk clarity not just to pharma, but ultimately to patients and caregivers.
5. As we look to the future, what are the next major steps for ArcaScience—whether in tech developments, partnerships, or broader platform scalability?
In the coming months, funds will be used to expand operations in the US with a new standard for drugs’ evaluation handed to the FDA and other authorities, launch the company’s second patient-facing solution, with an initial focus on pediatric brain cancer and dermatological diseases as well as for a strategic recruitment of a Chief Medical Officer, to accelerate the translation of ArcaScience’s AI as a new good practice solution for the whole industry looking for de-risking and optimizing their clinical pipelines.
Down the line, we want to fuel the entire drug development process with much faster, efficient and reliable tech. When you think of it, this is a sector that has not fundamentally evolved in decades. In 5 years time, I see ArcaScience shifting the way we prioritize and develop drugs, posing as a new global standard for both the industry and regional authorities and fast-tracking thousands of drugs to patients.
