CardiaTec, a Cambridge-based firm developing an AI platform to discover drugs for cardiovascular diseases, announced on Wednesday that it has raised £1.4M (approximately €1.6M) in a Pre-Seed round of funding.
The round was led by Laidlaw Scholars Ventures (LSV) and APEX Ventures with participation from Crista Galli Ventures, o2h ventures, and Cambridge Enterprise.
The latest funds will enable CardiaTec to continue development and unearth new treatments for patients.
What does CardiaTech solve?
Cardiovascular disease is a very common condition that remains ambiguous in its causes. And despite this, the number of heart failure patients has been rising over the past decade.
Investment and innovation in the field have been severely underutilised, especially when compared to oncology and neurodegenerative diseases.
The current treatment landscape remains stagnant, and although treatments are available, they are most often prescribed using a standardised “one-size-fits-all” approach.
As a result, new technologies must emerge to help close the gap. And here’s where CardiaTec comes into play.
Raphael Peralta (CEO), Thelma Zablocki (COO), and Dr. Namshik Han (CTO) founded CardiaTec to change the drug target discovery landscape for cardiovascular diseases and reduce its burden on public health.
Raphael and Thelma are graduates of the University of Cambridge MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise. Dr. Namshik Han is a world-leading academic in AI applications for target and drug discovery.
Han holds positions at the University of Cambridge as Head of AI at the Milner Therapeutics Institute and Associate Faculty of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine.
Dr. Namshik Han comments, “Recent advances in artificial intelligence are generating novel ways to interpret multiomic data. I am excited to lead CardiaTec’s technology strategy to establish a new paradigm for understanding the pathophysiology of cardiovascular diseases.”
CardiaTec: What you need to know
The UK company is developing a target discovery platform leveraging AI to make sense of large-scale multiomic cardiovascular data.
“CardiaTec’s proprietary platform unravels relationships that span across every level of biology, from gene variation, methylation, and expression to their connection to proteomic and metabolomic functions to best understand disease development,” says CardiaTec in the press statement.
The ultimate goal of CardiaTec is to leverage its systems biology approach to speed up the drug discovery process, reducing its costs and bringing to market new compounds that will help to save patients’ lives.
Raphael Peralta, CEO of CardiaTec, says, “Cardiovascular disease research has been subject to some very positive recent events, including the acquisition of MyoKardia and The Medicine Company.”
“We strongly believe, after several decades of stagnated investment and innovation, cardiovascular disease is re-emerging with newfound interest, driven not only by the increasing requirements to fulfil the unmet need as it persists as the world-leading cause of death, but in the application of AI in being able to drive new and meaningful insights to help meet patients needs. Therefore, CardiaTec finds itself incredibly well placed to help drive innovation forwards within this space, now supported by a great syndicate of investors,” he adds.
Investors
Laidlaw Scholars Ventures (LSV) is a for-profit business investing in startups founded and run by Laidlaw Scholars.
Backed by a $50M (approximately €49M) fund, LSV accelerates good businesses by financing growth, providing support services, delivering extensive training and development, and bringing a network of expert advisors and mentors.
Niall Santamaria, Chief Investment Officer of LSV, says, “We are delighted to support this exceptional team on their mission to improve patient outcomes by using AI for good. Despite the prevalence of cardiovascular ailments, there has been significant under-investment, so we believe these funds will provide CardiaTec with the opportunity to unearth treatments that make a real difference to patients.”
