On the heels of new research affirming its technology’s ability to help treat and even reverse the progression of Type 2 diabetes, Twin Health has collected another round of funding to support the spread of the tech.
The latest boost of VC support is a series D financing worth $50 million, the Silicon Valley startup announced Wednesday. It was led by Temasek, with additional support from previous investors including ICONIQ Growth, Sofina, Peak XV and Helena.
The series D round is not as much an identical twin to the company’s previous funding, but more of a Danny DeVito to the last round's Arnold Schwarzenegger. The 2021 series C brought in a whopping $140 million and shared a similar aim to the latest fundraising: to expand the reach of Twin Health’s technology to more people with chronic metabolic diseases.
“The funding will help propel our strategy to scale the availability of our transformative technology and the way it’s deployed to even more health plans and employer partners, achieving lower costs, better outcomes and higher satisfaction among their members and employees,” CEO Jahangir Mohammed, who founded the company in 2018, said in this week’s announcement.
Twin Health’s flagship technology, dubbed the Whole Body Digital Twin service, builds a virtual model of a user and uses it to pinpoint areas of improvement in their metabolism, providing recommendations for health and lifestyle shifts that could potentially aid in those improvements, helped along by an assigned personal health coach.
The tech works by taking in thousands of data points per day from wearable sensors, clinical lab tests and users’ own answers to questionnaires—spanning metabolism-related areas like nutrition, activity, sleep and breathing—then analyzing those data with artificial intelligence algorithms. The resulting plan and real-time health analyses and progress reports can be viewed via smartphone app, where users can also communicate with a licensed clinical care team.
The Whole Body Digital Twin program is currently offered through employers and insurance plans in the U.S. It’s meant to be used for a year, with the first few months dedicated to normalizing the metabolism, before the focus turns to correcting any issues identified by the AI. The final phase of the program aims to help users build habits to sustain the improvements they’ve made.
One-year results from a randomized controlled study of the technology were published in this month’s issue of the journal Endocrine Practice, showing that the digital twin service could significantly improve certain metabolic factors in people with Type 2 diabetes.
For one, 232 participants assigned to use the technology saw their average HbA1c levels drop nearly 3 percentage points, from a starting point of 9% down to 6.1%. The 84 participants assigned to receive standard-of-care treatment, meanwhile, experienced an improvement of barely one-third of a percentage point, as their average blood sugar levels dropped from 8.5% to 8.2%. In total, based on those HbA1c values, just over 72% of the 209 patients who used the digital twin technology for at least six months achieved remission of their diabetes, compared to none in the control group.
Meanwhile, the proportion of study participants with normal liver fat scores associated with non-alcoholic fatty liver disease (a measure referred to as NAFLD-LFS) increased from less than 12% to more than two-thirds of the participants assigned to use Twin Health’s technology. In the standard-of-care group, 16% started the study with normal NAFLD-LFS scores, but that number had dropped to 9.9% after one year.
Similar improvements were seen across a handful of other parameters, including NAFLD fibrosis scores, liver fat percentages, weight loss and the number of participants who were able to stop taking Type 2 diabetes medications.
The trial is still ongoing, Twin Health noted in this week’s announcement, with the third year of study now underway.