Cambridge, UK, 06 July 2022: CardiaTec, an AI drug target discovery company specializing in cardiovascular disease, has secured a £1.4m pre-seed investment led by Laidlaw Scholars Ventures (LSV) and APEX Ventures with participation from Crista Galli Ventures, o2h Ventures and Cambridge Enterprise.
Cardiovascular diseases have persisted as the world’s leading global cause of death since the 1980s. Yet, despite the rising number of deaths, cardiovascular investment and therapeutic innovation are immensely dwarfed when compared to fields such as oncology and neurodegenerative diseases. New technologies must emerge to help close the gap.
CardiaTec is developing a target discovery platform leveraging AI to make sense of large-scale multiomic cardiovascular data. As opposed to conventional singular omic analysis, CardiaTec’s 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.
The company was co-founded by Raphael Peralta (CEO), Thelma Zablocki (COO), and Dr. Namshik Han (CTO). Raphael and Thelma are graduates of the University of Cambridge MPhil in Bioscience Enterprise. Dr. Namshik Han is a world-leading academic in AI applications for target and drug discovery, and he holds positions at the University of Cambridge as Head of AI at the Milner Therapeutics Institute and Associate Faculty of the Cambridge Centre for AI in Medicine.
Dr. Namshik Han 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.”
(Sunil Shah, CEO of o2h Ventures with Dr Namshik Han, Co-Founder of CardiaTech outside the Milner Institute, Cambridge, UK)
