Century Well being, now with $2M, faucets AI to offer pharma entry to good affected person information

Synthetic intelligence can discover hidden indicators in information throughout healthcare, and firms like Nvidia are leaning into what this will imply. For instance, it announced two dozen new AI-powered tools final week for areas together with biotechnology and drug discovery. And Nvidia just isn’t alone.

Century Well being is a brand new startup additionally getting in on the motion. It’s making use of AI to medical 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 sent me down a rabbit hole,” mentioned Srivastava, whose background is in healthcare product growth and information. “One of the biggest issues around innovation for new treatments is efficient access to good patient data. This is now only possible because of generative AI. That data sat around for decades because it takes manual effort to normalize and extract insight 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 might then use that information on accepted medicine; to broaden to new medicine; or to seek out insights to broaden entry to medicine which have already been accepted.

The last word purpose is accelerating entry to therapies, Srivastava mentioned.

“Drug development is massively expensive, and on average, takes $1 billion to $2 billion to develop a new drug,” he mentioned. “From the pharma company’s perspective, when their drug is now approved, the mission is to get it to patients as quickly as possible. For us, that also means as affordably as possible with access to good real-world data.”

Now with $2 million pre-seed funding, Century Well being will run three to 5 pilots over the following a number of months. The purpose is to validate the preliminary expertise that collects the info and, most significantly, to see the influence 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 medicine, for instance, which affected person subpopulation could be underrepresented. Along with the validated expertise, one other milestone shall 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 buyers, together with Datavant founder Travis Could and Evidation founder and CEO Christine Lemke.

Alex Iskold, managing associate of 2048 Ventures, mentioned in an announcement, “At 2048 Ventures we have a strong thesis around real-time data, in healthcare and beyond. Vish and Sanjay have a vision to leverage AI and real world patient data to unlock a better feedback loop and ultimately faster and more efficient drug development and commercialization.”