CardiaTec Biosciences, a Cambridge-based AI drug target discovery company specialising in cardiovascular disease, has snagged £1.4 million in pre-seed funding. The financing round was led by Laidlaw Scholars Ventures and APEX Ventures (that backed Okapi:Orbits and smedo) along with participation from Crista Galli Ventures, o2h ventures and Cambridge Enterprise.
First investment by LSV
This raise marks the first investment of Laidlaw Scholars Ventures (LSV), a new Venture Capital fund established by the Laidlaw Foundation to invest in businesses led by Laidlaw Scholars. The funds will be used for continued development and unearth new treatments for patients. It will CardiaTec Biosciences combat cardiovascular diseases using AI.
Dr. Namshik Han, CTO of CardiaTec commented, “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.”
Raphael Peralta, CEO of CardiaTec, said, “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.”
Niall Santamaria, Chief Investment Officer of LSV, said, “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.”
AI to combat cardiovascular diseases
Reportedly, cardiovascular diseases have persisted as the world’s leading global cause of death since the past few decades. However, the field lacks major technological breakthroughs when compared to oncology and neurodegenerative diseases. New technologies are needed to fill the gap and combat cardiovascular diseases.
CardiaTec Biosciences was founded by Raphael Peralta, Thelma Zablocki, and Dr. Namshik Han in 2021. It applies artificial intelligence (AI) on large-scale multi-omic data to develop the next generation of cardiovascular disease targets. The goal of CardiaTec is to leverage its systems biology approach to speed up the drug discovery process, reduce its costs and bring new compounds that will help to save patients’ lives.
CardiaTec Biosciences is developing a target discovery platform leveraging AI to make sense of large-scale multi-omic cardiovascular data. As opposed to conventional singular omic analysis, its 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.
