Healx raises $56 million to combat rare diseases with AI
Summary
Founded out of Cambridge in 2014, Healx’s core AI Platform — Healnet — applies a range of machine learning techniques to public and proprietary data sources covering literature, clinical trials, patents, drug targets, chemical structures, symptoms, and more. The culmination of all this data, Guilliams said, results in a knowledge graph of rare diseases which could help pharmacologists or biologists unearth effective new treatments that would otherwise be much more difficult to spot. “We use a variety of machine learning algorithms to solve the many tasks necessary to predict drug treatments and translate them in the clinic effectively,” Healx CEO and cofounder Dr. Tim Guilliams told VentureBeat. “We don’t develop new chemistry and molecules, we maximize the value for the existing drugs — combining them in a clever way to improve their therapeutic effect when needed,” Guilliams continued. To help, Healx is launching a global accelerator program that will strive to find clinic-ready treatments of rare diseases within two years, a significant reduction on the decade or more it can typically take using traditional drug discovery processes.