Pharmaceutical giant Bayer is initiating a new digital partnership effort in the fields of cardiometabolic and renal disease, oncology and women’s health. Bayer will support five new startup companies as part of the company’s G4A Digital Health Partnerships Program.

Read more: Klue Announces Partnership with Stanford and Crossover Health for Its Behavior Change Tracker

The participating digital healthcare companies were selected by Bayer from over 400 applications from over 65 countries based upon current and future strategic fit, development stage and assessment, reports Bayer.

“Building new digital business models is a key element of Bayer’s business strategy, with the ambition to actively shape the future of healthcare. We are proud to support startups who share our vision of integrated healthcare solutions that put the patient in focus, not the disease,” said Jeanne Kehren, Ph.D., Head of Digital & Commercial Innovation and Member of the Pharmaceuticals Executive Committee of Bayer AG.

Bayer’s G4A partnership program offers two digital health collaboration segments. Under its Growth Track, selected early-stage startups receive EUR 100.000 funding to accelerate market uptake, coaching by Bayer executives, and tailored business acceleration clinics. Through the Advance Track framework, digital health companies are aligning for larger commercial deals.

Selected Growth Track partners are:

• Caria: Caria combines data and AI to connect women in menopause with evidence-based treatments, personalized health insights, and a supportive digital community.
• Elly Health: Elly Health is a digital health startup helping people impacted by chronic conditions to live healthier and happier through smart audio companionship. Users gain access to unique and personalized content around disease education, meditation practices, exercise videos, symptom management, psychosocial support and patient stories to improve their health-seeking behaviors.

Read more: Digital Health Company Sharecare Acquires Behavior Change Platform MindSciences

Selected Advance Track partners are:

• Decipher Biosciences: Decipher Biosciences offers a portfolio of genomic tests, is building the GRID database of over 85,000 whole transcriptome profiles, and is partnering with pharmaceutical companies to identify biomarkers of response to novel therapeutics.
• Sweetch: Sweetch is a clinically validated disease management optimization platform that utilizes Artificial Intelligence to significantly affect people's disease management behaviors and clinical outcomes. Sweetch's Just-in-Time Adaptive Intervention (JITAI) proprietary technology converts millions of data points originating from an individual's smartphone and other connected devices into contextual, hyper-personalized, just-in-time, just-in-place recommendations.
• MyONCARE: The Myoncare Digital Health Platform is a MDR certified medical device that enables the orchestration of all health process workflows with the patient at center in only one app. Since the platform is indication agnostic it provides for a holistic overview of the patients’ wellbeing and a telemedical communication system for his/her individually created care team.