Viagra inventor turns to AI for help

The tech start-up has a knowledge bank that maps over one billion unique disease, patients and drug interactions.

The British inventor of Viagra has raised initial funding for a Cambridge start-up that uses artificial intelligence technology to find medicines to treat thousands of the world's rarest diseases.

Dr David Brown, the scientist who developed the blockbuster treatment for erectile dysfunction for Pfizer, is the co-founder of Healx, a British medical tech start-up that uses machine learning to find treatments for 7000 rare conditions that do not currently have an approved method of treatment.

The US$10 million ($14.8m) initial funding round, led by European venture capital investor Balderton Capital, will allow Healx to develop new technology for what it described as "automated large-scale drug discovery".

Healx claims the traditional model of drug development by big pharmaceutical companies is "broken".

"The traditional drug discovery process takes 10 to 15 years at a cost of US$2b per new drug and with a failure rate of 95 per cent - it's broken, it's slow, it's high failure, and it's not economic for rare diseases," Brown explained.

The business applies one of the key lessons of Brown's work with Viagra, which was developed originally to treat heart patients: That drugs intended to help one condition can sometimes be adapted to treat others.

The tech start-up has a knowledge bank that maps over one billion unique disease, patients and drug interactions.

The database includes information from scientific research papers, clinical trials, disease symptoms and drug targets.

The AI developed by the team automatically scans this information to find existing drugs that could help to treat specific diseases, reducing the time and cost of the traditional discovery process.

There are between 6000 and 8000 known rare diseases and around five new rare diseases are described in medical literature each week, according to non-profit organisation Rare Disease UK.

One in 17 people, or 7 per cent of the population, will be affected by a rare disease at some point in their lives, the campaign group claims.

Healx's technology has already been used in collaboration with FRAXA, the patient group for the Fragile-X Syndrome, an incurable genetic disorder which can cause seizures and hyperactivity. A drug was discovered in under 15 months, cutting the time spent on drug development by 80 per cent.

"In some cases you can look for a cure but you have to be realistic about what is possible," explained co-founder and chief executive officer Tim Guilliams.

"In most cases you are trying to manage the disease and improve [the patient's] quality of life."