Healx raises $56 million to combat rare diseases with AI

Healx, a company using artificial intelligence (AI) to discover new drug treatments for rare diseases, has raised $56 million in a series B round of funding led by Atomico, with participation from Intel Capital, Balderton Capital, Global Brain, Btov Partners, Amadeus Capital Partners, and Cambridge Innovation Capital's Jonathan Milner. Founded out of Cambridge in 2014, Healx's core AI Platform -- Healnet -- applies a range of machine learning techniques to public and proprietary data sources, covering literature, clinical trials, patents, drug targets, chemical structures, symptoms, and more. Part of this process involves using natural language processing (NLP) to extract insights and knowledge from all the published sources around specific diseases. The culmination of all this data, Healx CEO and cofounder Dr. Tim Guilliams said, is a knowledge graph of rare diseases that could help pharmacologists or biologists unearth effective new treatments that would otherwise be much more difficult to spot. "We use a variety of machine learning algorithms to solve the many tasks necessary to predict drug treatments and translate them in the clinic effectively," Guilliams told VentureBeat.