CardiaTec Biosciences Raises $6.5M Seed Round to Target Cardiovascular Disease With Multi-Omics AI

September 10, 2024

CardiaTec Biosciences, a TechBio company spun out of the Han Lab at the University of Cambridge, has completed a $6.5 million seed funding round. The round was led by Montage Ventures, with participation from Continuum Health Ventures and existing investors Laidlaw Scholars Ventures and Apex Ventures. Two prominent industry angels also joined: Dr Maximilien Levesque, CEO and co-founder of Aqemia, and Naheed Kurji, former President of Recursion Pharmaceuticals Canada and founder of Cyclica — both individuals with direct expertise in computational drug discovery. The company was co-founded in 2021 by Raphael Peralta (CEO, a Laidlaw Scholar alumnus), Thelma Zablocki (COO), and Professor Namshik Han (CTO), who is also Head of AI at the Cambridge Milner Therapeutics Institute and a lecturer in AI drug discovery at the University of Cambridge. Peralta and Zablocki have been named to Forbes 30 Under 30 Europe.

Cardiovascular disease is the world's leading cause of death, responsible for approximately 17.9 million lives lost each year. It is also one of the most complex targets in drug discovery: the heart involves multiple cell types, developmental trajectories, and disease mechanisms that interact across molecular, cellular, and organ-level scales. Traditional drug discovery approaches, working from single-dimension data sources, have yielded limited success in translating molecular targets into viable cardiovascular therapies. The attrition rate across cardiovascular clinical programmes remains high, reflecting a fundamental gap between the simplicity of available data and the biological complexity of the disease.

CardiaTec's approach is to bridge this gap using high-dimensional multi-omics data collected directly from human cardiac tissues. The company has assembled what it describes as the world's largest proprietary multi-omics dataset from human heart tissue, gathered through partnerships with 65 hospitals across the UK and the United States. The dataset spans genomics, transcriptomics, proteomics, and epigenomics, capturing the full molecular landscape of cardiac biology across a diverse population. CardiaTec's proprietary AI platform integrates and analyses this multi-dimensional data to identify novel drug targets and prioritise the most differentiated therapeutic opportunities — targets that would be invisible to approaches working with single-omic data sources.

The $6.5M seed round will be used to expand CardiaTec's platform capabilities and progress its proprietary drug targets into the preclinical stage, where they can begin to be tested in disease-relevant models ahead of clinical development. Dr Joseph Lehár, former SVP of R&D Strategy at Owkin, has joined CardiaTec's scientific advisory board alongside the new funding, adding further expertise in AI-driven drug development at scale. The company has also established relationships with pharmaceutical industry partners it is engaging as potential licensing or co-development counterparties.

Todd Kimmel of Montage Ventures cited CardiaTec's data moat, strong pharma industry connections, and position at the forefront of a new era in cardiovascular drug discovery as the core rationale for leading the round. The combination of a proprietary human heart tissue dataset of unmatched scale, advanced AI infrastructure, and a founding team that spans clinical, computational, and commercial expertise represents, in investors' view, a uniquely differentiated platform for one of medicine's most valuable and historically challenging target areas.

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