The biomedical company ELEM, a spin-off of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, has launched a crowdfunding campaign to raise 1.2 million euros, which it will invest in the development of the V.HEART platform, an innovative project that allows the execution of the clinical phase in the research of new drugs through virtual human populations, to improve treatments without discriminating age, condition, or sex, and reducing animal testing.
Created in 2018 and with Barcelona Computer Center (BSC) as a partner and shareholder, ELEM already has 25% of the financing operation committed, with a total of 300,000 euros, by several business angels, including Namarel Ventures. The company expects to generate another non-dilutive financing round of between 1.5 million euros and 2 million euros between 2022 and 2023 to develop new research projects.
Initially focused on the cardiovascular field, the V.HEART platform allows calculating thousands of patient cases and comorbidities, ranging from preclinical to clinical studies, and producing medical and computational biomarkers to predict the safety and clinical efficacy of therapeutic products for the heart.
This platform provides new solutions to pharmaceutical laboratories that until now must carry out clinical and preclinical trials with the recruitment of volunteers, which poses a difficulty for biomedical companies given that the average dropout rate is 30% and, in many cases, the cause is cardiovascular risk.
The platform allows the execution of the clinical phase in the research of new drugs through virtual human populationsWhile, with V.HEART you can manage the data of thousands of patientsand perform, for example, patient segmentation with similar pathologies or an age classification, an interesting aspect if one takes into account that increasingly more specific medical treatments are needed, which amplifies the research problem in the clinical phase as it deals with increasingly smaller subgroups of eligible patients. Furthermore, testing pharmaceutical research by evaluating how the human organ reacts, in this case virtually, avoids possible risks or side effects.
For this reason, ELEM's virtual humans are avatars, adults or children, based on medical data from real patients with different comorbidities and conditions, and their platform allows biomedical industries to conduct large-scale, high-throughput cardiac clinical trials in human models and populations from day one. In this regard, according to data provided by ELEM, the market for preclinical and clinical trials in the area of cardiac risk is valued at approximately 3,268 million euros (3,700 million dollars), with growth expected to exceed 7% annually in the next 5 years.
With this projection in mind, the promoters of the spin-off Christopher Morton and Mariano Vázquez have created a large database, combining virtual and real patient data, which currently focuses on cardiovascular pathologies but could incorporate other human organs in the medium term. "The goal is to become the reference company in predictive biomedical technology in clinical trials and prognosis for cardiovascular therapies in high-definition virtual humans," explains Christopher Morton, CEO of the company, which is located in the Pier01 technology hub in Barcelona.
V.HEART is "a revolutionary solution in the world of clinical and preclinical trials, thanks to its predictive simulation technology and patient and disease modeling developed in the supercomputers of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center," states Mariano Vázquez, product director at ELEM.