AI can find hidden signals in data across healthcare, and companies like Nvidia are leaning into what that might mean. For example, this announced two dozen new AI-powered tools last week for areas such as biotechnology and drug discovery. And Nvidia isn’t alone.
Century Health is a new startup getting in on the action as well. It applies artificial intelligence to clinical data to uncover new applications for drugs. It works with pharmaceutical companies and researchers, initially at Yale and UC San Diego, to identify and commercialize the next breakthrough for diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, that affect tens of millions of patients.
The mission is personal for Century Health co-founder and CEO Vish Srivastava. He watched his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s progress to the point where he no longer recognized Srivastava.
“That led me down a rabbit hole,” said Srivastava, whose background is in healthcare product development and data. “One of the biggest issues around innovation for new treatments is efficient access to good patient data. This is now possible only because of genetic artificial intelligence. This data has been held for decades because it takes manual effort to normalize and extract information from it.”
That’s when he teamed up with his friend Sanjay Hariharan, a data scientist and AI engineer, to form Century Health. They built a platform to extract this hidden data and aggregate it. Researchers and pharmaceutical companies sign up to the platform and can then use this data to develop approved drugs. to be extended to new drugs. or to find information on extending access to drugs that are already approved.
The ultimate goal is to speed up access to treatments, Srivastava said.
“Drug development is extremely expensive, and on average it takes $1 billion to $2 billion to develop a new drug,” he said. “From the pharmaceutical company’s perspective, when their drug is approved now, the mission is to get it to patients as quickly as possible. For us, this also means as affordable as possible access to good real-world data.”
Now with $2 million in funding, Century Health will run three to five pilots over the next few months. The goal is to validate the original technology that collects the data and, more importantly, to see the impact that insights from these data sets can have, Srivastava said.
He sees these pilots as design partnerships and a way to get feedback on the drugs’ benefits, for example, which subpopulation of patients may be underrepresented. In addition to the validated technology, another milestone will be securing early revenue from the pilots, which Century Health can leverage to pursue another round of venture capital.
The investment was made 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.
Alex Iskold, managing partner of 2048 Ventures, said in a statement: “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.”
