As originally reported in the Cambridge Independent; rare disease treatment is full of potential. In part, because there aren’t many. This is not for lack of ability, but for lack of money, research, patient sizes, or political will to make the costly and time-consuming mission effective. If the method of finding solutions could be cheaper, easier, or faster though, many diseases could have their day on the table. Healx, an innovative rare-disease AI company, has made this their mission.
Healx sews the intersection of AI and rare diseases. They use machine learning and AI to make use of the vast and ever-growing information that could find patterns or new uses for drugs. The company began in 2014 and found their innovative approach to finding new drugs and repurposing others quickly prove effective. After a very successfully year, winning ‘AI Company of the Year 2019’ at Cambridge’s Independent Science and Technology Awards and raising $56 million in funds, HealX has made another major announcement: they will be partnering with Boehringer Ingelheim, a pharmaceutical company with expertise in rare neurological diseases. They intend to help the pharmaceutical company find the full range of uses for their drug creations.
How does Healx do it?
Healx has created an innovative platform for rare disease drug discovery called ‘Healnet‘ which uses AI and machine learning methods to extract information from published sources to compile and interpret the information to show novel connections. They explain that with 7,000 rare diseases affection 400 million patients worldwide, the fact that less than 5% of these people have any treatment options available is a massive hole in our healthcare. They intend to have 100 rare disease drugs in trials by 2025, contributing their bit to the unmet needs.
They hypothesize that many drugs could be suited to treat many more diseases. One issue for research on rare diseases is that there is not much information or its not put together. If there’s five people with a disease, it’s hard to find trends, large enough trial groups, or to identify more patients. There is much to be learned by compiling more thorough data. The company has an incredibly extensive set of medical data on rare diseases which it sifts through to match and create new drugs. The idea is that this method saves time and cuts out phases that traditional drugs must go through.
Fragile X receives New Drug Possibilities
Healx’s Healtnet platform has already put the AI to the works to find eight drugs that could be potential treatments for Fragile X syndrome. These new possible treatment options are now making their way through drug trials, one of which is about to be start phase 2 trials. This disease, like all the diseases they are working to treat, had no treatment options. The companies core aim is to find drugs for these diseases with unmet needs, particularly rare neurological disorders, that are still without pharmaceutical options.
The Partnership With BI
The new partnership with BI will mean pair this technology to BI’s drug developments in order to capitalize upon each of their respective expertises; Healx with technology and BI with drug manufacturing expertise, specifically for rare neurological disorders. They intend to use the technology to tell BI which selected indications to prioritize as they move forward with research.
Already, BI is one of the largest pharmaceutical companies in the world, and Healx is growing quickly. The two powerful players together should make for a strong alliance in the battle against rare diseases.
