Synthetic intelligence can discover hidden indicators in information throughout healthcare, and firms like Nvidia are leaning into what this could imply. For instance, it announced two dozen new AI-powered tools final week for areas together with biotechnology and drug discovery. And Nvidia isn’t alone.
Century Well being is a brand new startup additionally getting in on the motion. It’s making use of AI to scientific information to uncover new purposes for medicine. It’s working with pharmaceutical firms and researchers, initially at Yale and UC San Diego, to establish and commercialize the following breakthrough for illnesses, like Alzheimer’s, that have an effect on tens of thousands and thousands of sufferers.
The mission is a private one for Century Well being’s co-founder and CEO, Vish Srivastava. He watched his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s get to the purpose the place he didn’t acknowledge Srivastava anymore.
“That despatched me down a rabbit gap,” mentioned Srivastava, whose background is in healthcare product growth and information. “One of many greatest points round innovation for brand spanking new remedies is environment friendly entry to good affected person information. That is now solely doable due to generative AI. That information sat round for many years as a result of it takes handbook effort to normalize and extract perception from it.”
That’s when he teamed up with pal Sanjay Hariharan, an information scientist and utilized AI engineer, to kind Century Well being. They constructed a platform to extract that hidden information and combination it. Researchers and pharma firms subscribe to the platform and may then use that information on authorized medicine; to develop to new medicine; or to search out insights to develop entry to medicine which have already been authorized.
The last word objective is accelerating entry to remedies, Srivastava mentioned.
“Drug growth is massively costly, and on common, takes $1 billion to $2 billion to develop a brand new drug,” he mentioned. “From the pharma firm’s perspective, when their drug is now authorized, the mission is to get it to sufferers as shortly as doable. For us, that additionally means as affordably as doable with entry to good real-world information.”
Now with $2 million pre-seed funding, Century Well being will run three to 5 pilots over the following a number of months. The objective is to validate the preliminary expertise that collects the information and, most significantly, to see the impression the insights from these information units can carry, Srivastava mentioned.
He sees these pilots as design partnerships and a option to get suggestions on the advantages of medication, for instance, which affected person subpopulation is perhaps underrepresented. Along with the validated expertise, one other milestone can be to safe early income from the pilots, which Century Well being can leverage to go after one other spherical of enterprise capital.
The funding was led by 2048 Ventures with participation from LifeX, In all places, Alumni Ventures and a gaggle of angel traders, together with Datavant founder Travis Might and Evidation founder and CEO Christine Lemke.
Alex Iskold, managing associate of 2048 Ventures, mentioned in a press release, “At 2048 Ventures we have now a robust thesis round real-time information, in healthcare and past. Vish and Sanjay have a imaginative and prescient to leverage AI and actual world affected person information to unlock a greater suggestions loop and in the end sooner and extra environment friendly drug growth and commercialization.”