Cambridge Based an Advanced HealthTech firm Healx has raised €50.7m in a Series B funding round.
The company had secured $16m in a initial close of its series A funding round. The mission behind this funding is to improve the lives of rare disease patients, by using Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accelerate the discovery and development of treatments.
In 2014, the company had founded by Dr. David Brown and Ph.D. biophysicist Dr. Tim Guilliams after they came across the story of an American entrepreneur because persistence resulted in his disabled, his son diagnosed by a completely new and rare disease.
Till now they have raised around €50.7 million in series B financial round which has led by Atomico and joined by Intel Capital, Global Brain and btov Partners.
Also, in this round, existing investors like Balderton Capital, Amadeus Capital Partners, and Jonathan Milner also participated.
The firm has developed an AI-based drug design platform for rare diseases named as Healnet.
This technology is 80 percent faster, 80-90 percent cheaper and with a greater chance of success than the current drug discovery method.
Healx said to have already using Helnet potential therapies for diseases like Fragile X syndrome, Pitt Hopkins, neuroblastoma and CDKL5 which were validated in preclinical testing.
Guilliams, CEO said, “The size of this Series B financing, especially this quickly after our Series A round last year, is an endorsement of the value of our platform and the pace at which we have developed,”
“It allows us to scale our impact with the launch of our Rare Treatment Accelerator program and to progress into clinical trials,”
“To date, it’s been families and patient groups who have had to become experts in the diseases affecting their loved ones and have often been the ones driving forward the efforts into finding new treatments.
“With our unique combination of in-house R&D, industry collaborations and now the Rare Treatment Accelerator, we look forward to supporting these groups in their mission.”
Irina Haivas Principle at Atomico and now the board member of Healx said the trial-and-error based model of drug discovery has gone unchanged in a century.
“And it especially fails rare disease patients. 50 percent of these patients are children, many living with highly debilitating symptoms. Healx has shown that it doesn’t have to be the case, by combining AI with world-class pharmacological expertise and putting patients first.
“We believe that the new paradigm in drug discovery will emerge at the intersection of technology, data, and biology, and we’re confident that Healx’s team is paving the way to a new gold standard in rare disease treatment discovery.”