Artificial intelligence can find hidden signals in data across healthcare, and companies like Nvidia are leaning into what this can mean. For example, it announced two dozen new AI-powered tools last week for areas including biotechnology and drug discovery. And Nvidia is not alone.
Century Health is a new startup also getting in on the action. It’s applying AI to clinical data to uncover new applications for drugs. It’s working with pharmaceutical companies and researchers, initially at Yale and UC San Diego, to identify and commercialize the next breakthrough for diseases, like Alzheimer’s, that affect tens of millions of patients.
The mission is a personal one for Century Health’s co-founder and CEO, Vish Srivastava. He watched his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s get to the point where he didn’t recognize Srivastava anymore.
“That sent 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 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 friend Sanjay Hariharan, a data scientist and applied AI engineer, to form Century Health. They built a platform to extract that hidden data and aggregate it. Researchers and pharma companies subscribe to the platform and can then use that data on approved drugs; to expand to new drugs; or to find insights to expand access to drugs that have already been approved.
The ultimate goal is accelerating access to treatments, Srivastava said.
“Drug development is massively expensive, and on average, takes $1 billion to $2 billion to develop a new drug,” he said. “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 Health will run three to five pilots over the next several months. The goal is to validate the initial technology that collects the data and, most importantly, to see the impact the insights from those data sets can bring, Srivastava said.
He sees these pilots as design partnerships and a way to get feedback on the benefits of drugs, for example, which patient subpopulation might be underrepresented. In addition to the validated technology, another milestone will be to secure early revenue from the pilots, which Century Health can leverage to go after another round of venture capital.
The investment was led 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.”