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New funding for Healx

27 July 2018

The article at a glance

Healx, a rare-disease company supported by the Entrepreneurship Centre at Cambridge Judge Business School, announces a $10 million Series A funding round …

Healx, a rare-disease company supported by the Entrepreneurship Centre at Cambridge Judge Business School, announces a $10 million Series A funding round led by Balderton Capital.

Healx, a Cambridge-based company that seeks breakthroughs for rare diseases through artificial intelligence, announced a $10 million Series A funding round. Healx is supported by the Accelerate Cambridge programme at the Entrepreneurship Centre of Cambridge Judge Business School.

The new funding round is led by Balderton Capital, which focuses on European technology companies, and existing investors Jonathan Milner and Amadeus Capital Partners also participated in the round. The funding will be used to more than double Healx’s team of software engineers, pharmacologists and other professionals, and to expand its artificial intelligence and machine learning technologies.

Healx has created a database for rare diseases to find new treatments, including through redesigning existing drugs in order to speed up development and cut the cost of new drugs. The company says that there are 7,000 known rare diseases affecting 350 million people, but 95 per cent of rare diseases lack an approved treatment.

David Brown, the co-founder of Healx and co-inventor of the drug Viagra, said: “The traditional drug discovery process takes 10 to 15 years at a cost of $2 billion per new drug”, so it’s “not economic for rare diseases. However, today’s technology can change that and help 350 million under-served rare disease patients.”