Paradigm Health, seeking to use AI to enroll clinical trials, partners with Roche

When people talk about using artificial intelligence to transform the way drugs are studied, they often imagine that high-powered computers would replace any need for human experimentation.

But one startup, Paradigm Health, raised $253 million based on a different proposition: AI can make the process of setting up clinical trials cheaper, faster and fairer.

On Thursday, Paradigm announced two steps toward that goal: It said it had raised an additional $77 million from investors including ARCH and General Catalyst, and acquired a company from Flatiron Health, a unit of pharmaceutical giant Roche, which was looking to do a similar thing.