Heart disease is the world's biggest killer — this Cambridge Uni spinout is using AI to find new treatments
Cambridge University spinout CardiaTec is striving to tackle cardiovascular diseases, one of the world's leading causes of death, with AI.
While artificial intelligence (AI) promises to transform all manner of industries, the biggest game-changing breakthroughs in this new era of data-infused machine intelligence arguably lies in the field of drug discovery. By analyzing vast amounts of biological data, AI can help researchers predict how different chemical compounds will interact with specific targets in the body, accelerating the discovery of promising drug candidates.
It’s against this backdrop that Cambridge University spinout CardiaTec is striving to tackle cardiovascular diseases (CVD). To bolster its efforts, the company today said it has raised $6.5 million in a seed round of funding.
CVDs are the preeminent cause of death globally, resulting in 17.9 million deaths each year, according to The World Health Organization (WHO). At the top of the list is ischaemic heart disease (coronary heart disease), responsible for 13% of the world’s total deaths.
Founded in 2021, CardiaTec is the handiwork of biotech and bioengineering graduates Raphael Peralta (CEO) and Thelma Zablocki (COO). They’re supported by their third co-founder and CTO, Namshik Han, a lecturer in AI drug discovery at the University of Cambridge, where Peralta and Zablocki studied for an MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise. Han, who has a background in machine learning, computational biology, cancer genomics, and cancer epigenomics, is also head of AI at the university’s Milner Therapeutics Institute, which forges close ties with industry, including pharmaceutical companies.
“He (Han) is an academic who sits on the border with industry, so he understands that translational perspective,” Peralta told TechCrunch in an interview. “We came together with the opportunity to use Namshik’s work, but within the cardiovascular space.”
CardiaTec is tackling the crux of the problem: The average expense of progressing a drug candidate from discovery through launch is around $2.2 billion, and that cost is driven substantively by the fact that 90% of potential candidates fail in the process, according to Deloitte. CardiaTec is setting out to “decode” the biology of CVDs.
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