As originally reported in South Africa Latest News, Healx Ltd. has raised $56 million dollars to fund their development of treatment options for rare diseases using artificial intelligence. The British company is attempting to use their AI’s algorithms to discover more uses for and combinations of pre-existing drugs, and to better match diseases with their treatment.
Healx’s Alternative Approach to Drug Therapy
Rather than attempting to develop novel drugs, an endeavour that necessitates years and billions of dollars in funding and trials; the company is approaching drug therapy with an alternative strategy. This extensive and cost-intensive process is not necessarily the most efficient. Healx is attempting to mediate some of the waste of these processes to make better use of the drug development already out there. The company will only use drugs that have already gone through the extensive clinical trials and thus are proven to be safe. This saves the time and energy that goes into primary stages of drug development, and allows the experimentation to skip to the phases that study the side effects and effectiveness of the therapy on the specific disorders.
They are using algorithms to forgo the traditional method of trial and error with hypothesizes, which often are misleading and incorrect. Instead, the technology will work on its own using algorithms which can comb through the information without the direction of a hypothesis. Tim Guilliams, CEO and co-founder of Healx, explains that they are instead diverging from this method that has pre-existing expectations, stating ““What we’re doing is we’re calling it ‘hypothesis free’ — we let the algorithms decide first which diseases we work on.”
One of the co-founders of the company and chairman David Brown already used this strategy already when he worked at Pfizer Inc. where he helped developed Viagra, a drug originally intended to treat blood pressure. Though ineffective for their original intention, they luckily realized before the drug trials were terminated that it instead was effective to treat erectile dysfunction disorders, and it became a household name.
Current Trials on Fragile X Syndrome
This time, the company intends to use their newly acquired funds to trial therapies that treat fragile X syndrome, a cause of autism. Currently, fragile X syndrome has no treatment options. They additionally plan to expand their portfolio of medicines, such that they will have more on file to sift through. Without looking into inventing drug compounds, they will make drug treatment more effectively matched with diseases, and speed up the process of clinical trials to just a few years. According to Guilliams, they predict the company could have options ready on the market by 2025.
This round of funding primarily came from venture capital firm Atomico, Balderton Capital and Amadeus Capital Partners also were also notable contributing investors. Healx plans to go into another round of funding in the next two years, at which point they plan to consider a public offering.
