Artificial intelligence can find hidden signals in data across healthcare, and companies like Nvidia are paying attention to what this means. For example, last week the company announced 20 new AI-powered tools for fields such as biotech and drug discovery. Nvidia isn't alone.
Century Health is another startup getting in on the action. Applying AI to clinical data to discover new uses for medicines. The company will initially work with pharmaceutical companies and researchers at Yale University and the University of California, San Diego to identify and commercialize the next breakthrough treatments for diseases that affect tens of millions of patients, such as Alzheimer's disease. We are working on making it a reality.
This mission is personal for Vish Srivastava, co-founder and CEO of Century Health. He had watched his grandfather's Alzheimer's disease reach a level where he could no longer recognize Shrivastava.
“It sent me down the rabbit hole,” Srivastava said. His background is in healthcare product development and data. “One of the biggest challenges when it comes to innovating new treatments is efficient access to the right patient data. This is currently only possible through generative AI. Normalizing data to extract insights requires manual effort, so that data sat idle for decades.”
So he teamed up with his friend Sanjay Hariharan, a data scientist and applied AI engineer, to found Century Health. They built a platform to extract and aggregate that hidden data. Researchers and pharmaceutical companies can register on the platform and use their data for approved medicines. Expansion to new drugs. Or you can find insights to expand access to medicines that are already approved.
The ultimate goal is to accelerate access to treatment, Srivastava said.
“Drug development is very expensive, with an average cost of $1 billion to $2 billion to develop a new drug,” he said. “From a pharmaceutical company's perspective, when their drug is approved, their mission is to get it to patients as quickly as possible. For us, it's also about getting the right real-world data as affordable as possible. It means you have access.”
Now with $2 million in pre-seed funding, Century Health plans to conduct three to five pilots over the next few months. The goal is to validate the initial technology that collects the data and, most importantly, to see the impact of the insights gained from those datasets, Srivastava said.
He sees these pilot efforts as a partnership design and a way to get feedback on the drug's benefits, for example, which patient populations are underrepresented. In addition to a validated technology, another milestone for him is securing early revenue from the pilot, which Century Health could leverage to pursue the next round of venture capital. can.
The investment was led by 2048 Ventures with participation from LifeX, Everywhere, Alumni Ventures, and a group of angel investors including Datavant founder Travis May and Evidation founder and CEO Christine Lemke.
2048 Ventures Managing Partner Alex Iskold said in a statement: Bish and Sanjay have a vision of leveraging AI and real-world patient data to unlock better feedback loops and ultimately enable faster and more efficient drug development and commercialization. ”