Landing Med has recently completed an RMB 320 million Series D round of financing led by Alibaba Health and followed by Ether Capital, according to a 36kr report.
Details:
Founded in 1999, Wuhan-based Landing Med focuses on proving AI cancer screening services. The company has 12 subsidiaries, 5 large AI labs, and 67 small and medium-sized AI labs in China. The company has completed AI cloud diagnostic screening for 3 million people nationwide. It’s AI diagnostic products are used in more than 600 general hospitals in China.
The company is currently establishing a diagnostic research center in Pakistan to provide free AI cervical cancer screening for 10,000 Pakistani women.
In 2019, Wuhan Landing cooperated with Shannan Maternal and Child Health Hospital to establish the first cervical cancer screening center in Tibet Autonomous Region, providing medical resources to the underserved residents in Shannan.
The company will use proceeds to expand its AI diagnostic service to cover tumors, such as thyroid, breast, gastrointestinal cancer, etc. In addition, Landing Med also plans to explore the possibility of AI pathology and collaborate with Alibaba Health to provide cloud diagnosis directly to consumers.
Context:
In recent years, the AI medical industry in China has grown exponentially. Four companies, including Keya Medical, Airdoc, Infer Vision, and Shukun Technology have filed to list at the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.
Regulators are supporting the industry by issuing licenses to medical AI devices. The recently released "China National Program for Women's Development (2021-2030)" encourages "innovative applications of big data, cloud computing, artificial intelligence, and computer simulation technology in the field of women's health."
Such policy aims to utilize AI technology to make up for the insufficiency and uneven distribution of medical resources in China, with AI pathology being the next hot spot.
According to research by China's National Health Commission in 2019, 59.9% of hospitals do not have a pathology unit. The national demand for pathologists is around 132,000, yet by the end of 2019, there were only 19,000 registered pathologists, amounting to a shortfall of 113,000.
In addition, the distribution of pathologists is hugely uneven. In 2014, 61.8% of the registered pathologists were stationed in tertiary hospitals, while only 0.9% were stationed in primary hospitals.
According to a market estimation by Guangzheng Hang Seng Advisory, the potential market size of histopathology is about 2.5 billion yuan, the potential market size of cytopathology is about 44.2 billion yuan, and the overall market size of pathology diagnosis is about 50 billion yuan.