Century Health, now with $2M, taps AI to give pharma access to good patient data

Synthetic intelligence can discover hidden alerts in knowledge throughout healthcare, and firms like Nvidia are leaning into what this may imply. For instance, it announced two dozen new AI-powered tools final week for areas together with biotechnology and drug discovery. And Nvidia is just not alone.

Century Well being is a brand new startup additionally getting in on the motion. It’s making use of AI to scientific knowledge to uncover new purposes for medicine. It’s working with pharmaceutical corporations and researchers, initially at Yale and UC San Diego, to determine and commercialize the subsequent 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,” stated Srivastava, whose background is in healthcare product growth and knowledge. “One of many largest points round innovation for brand spanking new remedies is environment friendly entry to good affected person knowledge. That is now solely potential due to generative AI. That knowledge 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 buddy Sanjay Hariharan, a knowledge scientist and utilized AI engineer, to kind Century Well being. They constructed a platform to extract that hidden knowledge and mixture it. Researchers and pharma corporations subscribe to the platform and might then use that knowledge on authorized medicine; to develop to new medicine; or to search out insights to develop entry to medicine which have already been authorized.

The final word aim is accelerating entry to remedies, Srivastava stated.

“Drug growth is massively costly, and on common, takes $1 billion to $2 billion to develop a brand new drug,” he stated. “From the pharma firm’s perspective, when their drug is now authorized, the mission is to get it to sufferers as shortly as potential. For us, that additionally means as affordably as potential with entry to good real-world knowledge.”

Now with $2 million pre-seed funding, Century Well being will run three to 5 pilots over the subsequent a number of months. The aim is to validate the preliminary know-how that collects the information and, most significantly, to see the influence the insights from these knowledge units can carry, Srivastava stated.

He sees these pilots as design partnerships and a option to get suggestions on the advantages of medication, for instance, which affected person subpopulation could be underrepresented. Along with the validated know-how, one other milestone will probably 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 every single place, 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, stated in an announcement, “At 2048 Ventures we’ve a powerful thesis round real-time knowledge, in healthcare and past. Vish and Sanjay have a imaginative and prescient to leverage AI and actual world affected person knowledge to unlock a greater suggestions loop and finally quicker and extra environment friendly drug growth and commercialization.”