Century Health has raised $2 million to use artificial intelligence to provide pharmaceutical companies with good patient data

Artificial intelligence can find hidden signals throughout healthcare data, and companies like Nvidia are studying what this might mean. For example, it announced two dozen new artificial intelligence tools last week for areas such as biotech and drug discovery. Nvidia is not alone.

Century Health, a new company, is also getting in on the action. It applies artificial intelligence to clinical data to discover new applications for drugs. The company is working with pharmaceutical companies and researchers, initially at Yale and UC San Diego, to identify and commercialize the next breakthroughs in diseases like Alzheimer’s that affect tens of millions of patients.

This mission is personal for Century Health co-founder and CEO Vish Srivastava. He watched his grandfather’s Alzheimer’s disease progress to the point where he no longer recognized Srivastava.

“That threw me for a loop,” said Srivastava, whose background is in healthcare product development and data. “One of the biggest issues with new therapy innovation is efficient access to good patient data. Now this is only possible with generative AI. This data has been around for decades because humans have been required to normalize it and extract insights from it.”

That’s when he teamed up with friend Sanjay Hariharan, a data scientist and applied artificial intelligence engineer, to found Century Health. They built a platform to extract hidden data and aggregate it. Researchers and pharmaceutical companies subscribe to the platform and can then use the data for approved drugs; expand to new drugs; or find insights to expand access to already approved drugs.

Srivastava said the ultimate goal is to speed up access to treatment.

“Drug development is very expensive, with an average of $1 billion to $2 billion required to develop a new drug,” he said. “From a pharmaceutical company’s perspective, when their drug is approved, the task is to get it to patients as quickly as possible. For us, that also means getting good, real-world data as cost-effectively as possible.”

Century Health currently has $2 million in pre-seed funding and will launch three to five pilots in the coming months. The goal, Srivastava said, is to validate the initial techniques for collecting the data and, most importantly, see the impact that insights from these datasets can have.

He sees these pilots as a way to design partnerships and get feedback on the benefits of drugs, such as which patient subgroups may be underrepresented. In addition to proven technology, another milestone will be securing early revenue from the pilot project, which Century Health can use to pursue 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 at 2048 Ventures, said in a statement: “At 2048 Ventures, we have a strong thesis on real-time data in healthcare and beyond. Vish and Sanjay’s vision is to leverage artificial intelligence and the real world patient data to unlock better feedback loops, ultimately enabling faster and more efficient drug development and commercialization.”