Lucera GmbH has formally launched operations as a new TechBio company focused on applying artificial intelligence and advanced data integration to pharmaceutical research and development. The company was established after a consortium of institutional and private investors acquired the pharmaceutical technology business of Molecular Health GmbH and transferred the assets into the newly formed organization.
Based in Heidelberg, Germany, Lucera aims to address challenges associated with the growing volume of biomedical data available to pharmaceutical companies. While drug developers have access to increasing amounts of data and AI-driven analytical tools, translating that information into actionable development decisions remains a significant challenge. Lucera’s strategy centers on providing biologically grounded and evidence-based insights that support decision-making across the drug development process.
The company’s core technology platform is Dataome®, a proprietary biomedical knowledge base developed over more than 15 years. The platform combines semantically integrated data with a Knowledge Graph that connects biomedical entities, evidence and relationships across multiple data sources and biological scales. According to the company, this approach enables users to transform fragmented datasets into traceable and decision-ready insights.
Lucera’s technology is designed to support a range of activities including target validation, indication prioritization, biomarker identification, patient stratification, clinical trial design, trial simulation, safety assessment and portfolio evaluation. The company also integrates real-world evidence, multi-omics analysis and mechanistic modelling to provide additional context for development decisions.
Friedrich von Bohlen, PhD, who has been appointed Chief Executive Officer, said, “With Lucera, we have the proven technology and expertise at hand to enable highly informed decision-making in biopharma R&D and life science investing by providing our clients a thorough understanding of a new drug candidate all along its development path – from target or phenotype to clinical path to side effect profile.”
He added, “By making biological rationale, patient context, evidence gaps, and development risks more explicit, Lucera supports better probability-of-technical-success assessment, more focused cohort design, more efficient evidence generation, and more informed preclinical and clinical development planning.”
Lucera begins operations with an interdisciplinary team of 25 employees who joined from Molecular Health and bring expertise across biomedical knowledge engineering, computational biology, translational science, artificial intelligence and drug development. The company reports having previously completed projects with more than 20 biotechnology, pharmaceutical and venture capital organizations worldwide and plans to continue serving pharmaceutical, biotechnology and investment sector clients through both consulting services and software offerings.
Click here for the original news story.
