DURHAM – IQVIA is working to expand one of the world’s largest social networks for cancer patients.

The life science giant, which provides biopharmaceutical research analytics, announced it was the lead backer for a $14 million Series B fundraising round for Belong.Life.

The company created “Belong – Beating Cancer Together” mobile app, a social network and navigator app for cancer patients, caregivers and healthcare professionals.

Other participants in the round included The Group Ventures and other existing investors.

“We are honored by the support and trust of IQVIA and our investors,” Eliran Malki, co-founder and chief executive officer of Belong.Life, said in a statement.

“We at Belong are focused on building the most robust, hyper-personalized and configurable patient engagement and research platform.

Back in 2015, he founded the company with fellow entrepreneurs Irad Deutsch and Ohad Rubin after each lost relatives to cancer. In that short time, it has quickly grown to include more than 200,000 users, according to its website.

The company said it plans to use the funds to advance the network and the new Belong Patient Engagement Platform (PEP), which is gaining traction among global healthcare providers, payers, and life science companies.

PEP is designed to improve patient engagement, education, compliance, satisfaction, auto-care coordination and efficiency.

“The end-to-end solution provides patients, payers, providers, and life science companies with hyper-personalized and configurable patient engagement tools, navigation and management services,” the company said in the release.

For its part, IQVIA, which formed from the $17.6 billion merger of IMS Health and contract research organization Quintiles in 2016, said its investment in Belong is part of a strategy “to identify and accelerate disruptive technologies that can improve healthcare.”

“Through its unique patient engagement platform with machine learning and artificial intelligence capabilities, Belong can utilize and complement IQVIA’s solutions to transform patient engagement,” Tal Rosenberg, IQVIA’s senior vice president of Global Technology Solutions, said in statement.

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