Artificial intelligence (AI) promises to transform every industry, but perhaps the most dramatic breakthrough in this new era of data-infused machine intelligence will be in drug discovery. By analyzing vast amounts of biological data, AI helps researchers predict how different compounds will interact with specific targets in the body, accelerating the discovery of promising drug candidates.
That's why CardiaTec, a University of Cambridge spinout company working to eradicate cardiovascular disease (CVD), today announced it has raised $6.5 million in seed funding to further its efforts.
According to the World Health Organization (WHO), CVD is the leading cause of death worldwide, with 17.9 million deaths due to CVD each year. Topping the list is ischemic heart disease (coronary heart disease), which accounts for 13% of total deaths worldwide.
Founded in 2021, CardiaTec is the brainchild of Rafael Peralta (CEO) and Thelma Zablocki (COO), both of whom have degrees in biotechnology and bioengineering. They are supported by their third co-founder and CTO, Namsik Han. Han is a lecturer in AI drug discovery at the University of Cambridge, where Peralta and Zablocki both studied their MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise. With a background in machine learning, computational biology, cancer genomics and cancer epigenomics, Han is also Head of AI at the University's Milner Institute for Therapeutics, which has close ties with industry, including pharmaceutical companies.
“Han is an academic who sits at the interface with industry, so he understands the translational perspective,” Peralta told TechCrunch in an interview. “We decided to collaborate because we saw an opportunity to leverage Nam-sik's research in the cardiovascular space.”
CardiaTec is tackling the heart of the problem. According to Deloitte, the average cost of taking a drug candidate from discovery to launch is about $2.2 billion, a cost substantially driven up by the fact that 90% of candidates fail along the way. CardiaTec aims to “decode” the biology of CVD.
To achieve this, the company has partnered with 65 hospitals in the UK and US to provide human heart tissue as part of the company's wider data collection efforts, which will enable the company to build “the largest human cardiac tissue multi-omics dataset,” encompassing a wide range of molecular biological information, which CardiaTec hopes to use to identify new targeted therapeutics.
“Historically, accessing human tissue, especially deceased tissue, has been very difficult because of issues around consent, ethics and logistics,” Peralta says. “Now hospitals have a much better infrastructure where they can actually access these human tissues and start generating data.”
In the context of cardiovascular disease, this means that CardiaTec can compare healthy arterial tissue with that of arteries that have suffered a heart attack due to plaque buildup, and generate the data that its computational models need further downstream. Such computational approaches involve vast amounts of different “multi-omics” data types, and can aggregate and analyze data on a scale that humans could never keep up with.
“We can now look at not just genetics, but genetics, epigenetics, gene expression and protein function, all in a single model,” Peralta says, “so we can get a much deeper understanding of the mechanisms that cause disease.”
CardiaTec Co-Founder and CEO Rafael Peralta Image courtesy of CardiaTec (Opens in new window)
The crux of the issue
While no medicines created with the help of AI are on the market yet, early promise has created a wave of excitement and a string of startups have raised loads of funding in the process. In the past few months alone, companies like Xaira have emerged from stealth with $1 billion in funding, while Sam Altman-backed Formation Bio has raised $372 million, while in the UK, Healx has raised $47 million to identify new drugs for rare diseases.
Insilico Medicine, a pharmaceutical startup with heavy venture capital backing, recently claimed a world first by announcing that it had identified a potential drug for a rare lung disease called idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis. AI played a key role not only in designing the drug's chemical structure, but also in determining which parts of the cell it should target. The drug was initially tested in animals and is currently undergoing “phase 2” trials in the US and China, which will hopefully provide the evidence needed to establish its efficacy in human treatment.
In other fields, AI is helping discover everything from new antibiotics to tackle superbugs to medicines to treat obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD).
Citing data from the peer-reviewed journal Nature Reviews Drug Discovery, Peralta said one of CardiATech's key differentiators is its focus on cardiovascular disease, a disease targeted by only 3% of AI-first active companies.
“The majority of companies applying AI to treatment discovery are in oncology, followed by central nervous system and neurological diseases, respiratory and infectious diseases, and at the bottom of the list, cardiovascular disease,” Peralta said. “Cardiovascular disease is the number one cause of death in the world. Although it is not well known, there is a huge unmet need in the pharmaceutical industry.”
CardiaTec had previously raised $1.8 million in pre-seed funding, and this new $6.5 million in cash gives the company plenty of capital to expand its own data collection efforts, wet-lab validation of its therapeutic target models, and strengthen its eight-person team in Cambridge. The next step will be to begin identifying and testing actual drug candidates, but in the grand scheme of things for drug research and development, that's probably years away.
CardiaTec's seed round was led by Montage Ventures, with participation from Continuum Health Ventures, Laidlaw Ventures, Apex Ventures, and a number of angel investors.