Heart disease is the world’s biggest killer — this Cambridge Uni spinout is using AI to find new treatments

 

While artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to revolutionize a wide range of sectors, the field of drug development may see the most significant advancements in this new era of data-infused machine intelligence. Artificial Intelligence (AI) can speed up the hunt for new medication ideas by helping researchers forecast how various chemical compounds will interact with particular targets in the body by evaluating massive volumes of biological data.

CardiaTec, a Cambridge University spinout, is working to combat cardiovascular diseases (CVD) in light of this. The startup announced today that it has raised $6.5 million in a seed round of funding to support its operations.


According to The World Health Organization (WHO), cardiovascular diseases (CVDs) are the leading cause of death worldwide, accounting for 17.9 million deaths annually. At the top of the list, accounting for 13% of global fatalities, is ischemic heart disease, also known as coronary heart disease.

Raphael Peralta (CEO) and Thelma Zablocki (COO), two recent biotech and bioengineering graduates, created CardiaTec. Their third co-founder and chief technology officer, Namshik Han, who teaches AI drug discovery at the University of Cambridge, where Peralta and Zablocki completed their MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise, provides support. With a background in cancer genomes, cancer epigenomics, computational biology, and machine learning, Han leads the university's Milner Therapeutics Institute, which establishes strong relationships with the pharmaceutical sector.

Peralta said in an interview with TechCrunch, "He (Han) is an academic who sits on the border with industry, so he understands that translational perspective." "We got together because we wanted to apply Namshik's work in the cardiovascular domain."

CardiaTec is addressing the main issue: According to Deloitte, the average cost of developing a medication candidate from discovery to launch is approximately $2.2 billion, and this cost is significantly influenced by the fact that 90% of possible candidates fail along the process. The goal of CardiaTec is to "decode" the biology of CVDs.

In order to accomplish this, the company has partnered with 65 hospitals in the United States and the United Kingdom to obtain human heart tissue as part of its larger data collection efforts. This will enable the company to create what it refers to as the "largest human heart tissue-multi-omics dataset," which covers a wide range of biological data from various molecular biology fields. CardiaTec wants to find new, focused treatments by doing this. 

“Historically, it’s been very difficult to access human tissue, especially those of deceased people because of matters related to consent, ethics, and logistics,” Peralta said. “Now the infrastructure in hospitals is much more embedded, and we can actually begin to get access to these human tissues and generate data.”

In the context of cardiovascular disease, this means that CardiaTec can compare healthy artery tissue with that of an artery where plaque buildup has led to a heart attack, and generate the data its computational models need further downstream. Such computational approaches, involving a vast amount of different “multi-omics” data types, are capable of aggregating and analyzing data at a scale humans simply can’t match.

“We can now look not just in genetics, but we can look at genetics, epigenetics, gene expression, protein function, all in a single model,” Peralta said. “So we have a much more in depth understanding of the mechanisms that are driving disease.”

The core issue

Even while medications assisted by artificial intelligence (AI) have not yet reached the market, the early promise has generated great excitement and attracted enormous sums of money for a number of firms. Just in the last few months, companies like Xaira have come out of stealth with $1 billion in finance, while Formation Bio, backed by Sam Altman, has raised $372 million. Meanwhile, Healx has secured $47 million in funding to find novel medications for uncommon illnesses in the UK.


The pharmaceutical business Insilico Medicine, heavily financed by venture capital, recently revealed that it has discovered a novel treatment candidate for idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis, an uncommon lung condition. This achievement was a world first. AI was essential in developing the drug's chemical structure as well as determining which cell type the medication should target. The medication is presently undergoing "Phase II" trials in China and the United States in the hopes of gathering the data required to prove its effectiveness in treating people. The medicine was first tested on animals.

AI is also being utilized in other areas to aid in the discovery of novel medications for treating obsessive compulsive disorder (OCD) and new antibiotics to combat superbugs.

According to Peralta, one of CardiaTec's primary differentiators is that it focuses only on cardiovascular disease, whereas just 3% of active AI-first firms are addressing this condition. Peralta cited data from the peer-reviewed publication Nature Reviews Drug Discovery.

According to Peralta, "the majority of companies using AI for therapeutic discovery are in the oncology space, with the rest specializing in respiratory, infectious, and central nervous system disorders, and, at the bottom of the list, neurogenic diseases and cardiovascular diseases." "Not many people are aware that cardiovascular disease is the leading cause of death worldwide, but there is a significant unmet need that hasn't been addressed by pharmaceutical companies."

With this additional $6.5 million in cash, CardiaTec, which had previously raised $1.8 million in pre-seed capital, is well-financed to expand its unique data collection activities, validate its therapeutic targets model in a wet lab, and support its eight-person team in Cambridge. The next stage, which in the overall scheme of drug R&D is probably some years away, is to begin selecting and testing genuine medication candidates.

Montage Ventures led CardiaTec's seed round, in which Continuum Health Ventures, Laidlaw Ventures, Apex Ventures, and many angel investors also participated.