MIT spinout uses AI to treat fatty liver disease
The company received a seed round funding of $1.5 million by a round led by Rivas Capital and plans to use it for collecting metabolomics data of the patients.
Artificial Intelligence is all set to revolutionise the healthcare industry. There is a considerable increase expected in the spends on the Artificial Intelligence. As per the website aibusiness.com, by 2020, the AI spends will reach a figure of $47 billion; this number was $8 million in 2016. Be it virtual assistants, intelligent automation, or cognitive computing, AI is going to be everywhere and healthcare industry would be benefitting largely from it.
ReviveMed, founded by Leila Pirhaji, has raised $1.5M in a seed round, to accelerate its AI solutions that study metabolomics to treat diseases by improving the current drugs and developing new ones. The funding round was led by Rivas Capital with participation from institutional investors that include TechU, Team Builder Ventures, and WorldQuant Ventures. The funding will be used to study metabolomics data of the patients.
“If you want genomic sequencing or RNA data, there are lots of databases available,” Pirhaji said. “However, that’s not the case for metabolomics data. We’re actually spending some of our funding [from the seed round] to collect data from patients and controls.”
Non-alcohol fatty liver disease, a leading cause of liver failure and cirrhosis, will be the first target of the company. The disease affects at least 30% population in the United States. Eventually, the company wants to invest efforts in the treatment of other metabolic diseases.
Pirhaji formed the company when she was pursuing PhD at MIT. She, along with a group of researchers, provided proof of concept, in a medical journal Nature Medicine in the year 2016. They based their model on Huntington’s disease.
The private investment firm, Rivas Capital Founder Carlos Gonzalez will join the ReviveMed board of directors for financing purposes.
“ReviveMed has made great progress in demonstrating the enormous potential of its platform, through several initial collaborations with leading pharmaceutical companies, including a top three pharma company,” said Mr Gonzalez. “The financing will allow the company to continue scaling the platform and begin building its internal drug discovery pipeline.”
The healthcare industry looks to be riding high on AI wave. Thus, it is prepared to deliver a huge impact on various healthcare aspects such as patient care, precision medicine and day-to-day operations.
“I can see that the industry has changed since working to build my company,” Pirhaji said. “It’s definitely a good time to be a part of this movement and part of this exciting new era.”
Image credit: www.revive-med.com
